Jewish Life in Medieval Spain: A New History 9781512823844

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 At the Edge of the West Jewish Life in al-Andalus
CHAPTER 2 Spanish Jewry in Transition
CHAPTER 3 Conflict and Confluence in the Thirteenth Century
CHAPTER 4 Jewish Society in the Fourteenth Century
CHAPTER 5 Death and Taxes Riots, Plague, and Debt in the Mid-Fourteenth Century
CHAPTER 6 1391 Riots, Conversion, and the New Status Quo
CHAPTER 7 Jewish Society in the Fifteenth Century
Epilogue
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

Jewish Life in Medieval Spain

JEWISH CULTUR E & CONTEXTS (JCX) A broadly interdisciplinary series published in association with the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania. List the volumes available in the JCX series. Series Editors: Francesca Trivellato Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study Shaul Magid Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College Steven Weitzman Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures Ella Darivoff Director of the Katz Center of Advanced Judaic Studies

Jewish Life in Medieval Spain A New History

Jonathan Ray

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www​.upenn​.edu​/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress Hardcover ISBN 978-­1-­512-­82383-­7 eBook ISBN 978-­1-­512-­82384-­4

CONTENTS

Introduction 1 Chapter 1. At the Edge of the West: Jewish Life in al-­Andalus

11

Chapter 2. Spanish Jewry in Transition

55

Chapter 3. Conflict and Confluence in the Thirteenth Century

82

Chapter 4. Jewish Society in the Fourteenth Century

125

Chapter 5. Death and Taxes: Riots, Plague, and Debt in the Mid-­Fourteenth Century

168

Chapter 6. 1391: Riots, Conversion, and the New Status Quo

195

Chapter 7. Jewish Society in the Fifteenth Century

225

Epilogue 267

Notes 273 Bibliography 305 Index 325

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Map 1: Jewish Spain, Tenth–Twelfth Centuries

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Map 2: Jewish Spain, Thirteenth–Fifteenth Centuries

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Introduction

Perhaps no chapter in the history of the Jewish people has fired the imagination as much as that of the Jews in medieval Spain. From the ninth to fifteenth centuries, Jewish artisans, merchants, physicians, and scholars lived throughout the Iberian Peninsula, flourishing under both Muslim and Christian rule. They established a wide array of communities, both large and small, that were among the most culturally vibrant and intellectually prolific in the medieval world. The very name of Jewish Spain, “Sepharad,” conjures up romantic notions of a golden age of Jewish life—a world of poets and philosophers, spice merchants and rabbis. The eventual downfall of this fabled society is also bound up with some of the most dramatic, and infamous, events in Jewish history, such as the rise of the Spanish Inquisition and the final expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. But the cultural triumphs of the Jews of Spain—and the collective tragedies that put an end to their world—can only be appreciated properly in their social-­historical context and as part of the lived experience of the Jews themselves. Daily life in medieval Spain could, in fact, vary significantly for different sectors of Jewish society. This book tells the story of that society, attempting to recover some of these differences and thereby to enrich our understanding of the Jews of medieval Spain.

Jewish History in the Shadow of Convivencia The prevailing outline of Jewish history in medieval Spain was established more than fifty years ago by two European-­born Israeli historians: Eliyahu Ashtor and Yitzhak Baer. Drawing on nearly a century of pioneering scholarship, Ashtor and Baer each wrote monumental, multivolume histories of

2

Introduction

the Jews in Spain. The earlier “Muslim” period was covered by Ashtor and the later “Christian” period by Baer. Ashtor portrayed Jewish life in Muslim Spain as distinguished by intellectual achievement and interfaith harmony, while Baer’s study of Jewish life under Christian rule emphasized growing Christian animosity and Jewish social and religious decline. These contrasting portraits of medieval Sephardic history continue to exert a strong influence on scholarly and popular audiences alike. The very division of the Middle Ages in Spain into these two periods remains fundamental to our understanding of Sephardic history and culture.1 It has been common to focus on religious tolerance as the determining factor in the development of Jewish civilization. Historians like to evaluate and track Jewish relations with their host cultures. When and why did interfaith relations flourish, deteriorate, collapse? In the case of medieval Spain, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in close proximity, a notion of benign coexistence, or convivencia, has radically shaped our reading of its history. But while discussions of convivencia succeed in recognizing the unique interaction of Spain’s various religious communities, they often miss the ways those relationships resonated within the communities themselves.2 More important, the history of the Jews of Spain has come to be defined by moments of interfaith encounter rather than by the evolving structures of Jewish society itself. To remedy this, my focus here will be on the internal dynamics of Jewish communities. Interreligious coexistence, though widely regarded as a laudable hallmark of a tolerant society, also presented problems to minority communities. For medieval Jews the prospect of cultural assimilation often posed a greater threat than that of exclusion. After all, in a world where communities were defined first and foremost by religious identity, minorities expected a certain amount of exclusion, even as they hoped for peaceful relations with their societies. This was especially true for Jews who, theologically speaking, understood themselves to be in divinely imposed exile among the nations of the earth. But preserving a distinct religious heritage in a relatively open marketplace of ideas, languages, and cultures was a perennial concern to Jewish spiritual leaders and Jewish communal officials alike, who viewed the accessibility of non-­Jewish culture as a serious challenge to the religious piety, social cohesion, and political autonomy of their communities. This anxiety over Jewish fraternization with non-­Jews became a hallmark of Jewish life in Muslim Spain, or al-­Andalus. To be sure, the Jews’ integration into the surrounding culture was strikingly fruitful, inspiring and

Introduction

3

contributing to a brilliant Jewish intellectual renaissance during the High Middle Ages. Indeed, Jewish literary production in al-­Andalus is among the reasons this era is regarded as a Jewish golden age. But a recurring theme in this literature is the deep ambivalence many of these same Jews felt regarding their participation in Arabic culture and their adoption of many of its norms. The allure of non-­Jewish society continued to pose an existential threat to Spanish Jews as the region shifted from Muslim to Christian rule over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Ever a minority, Jews who sought to attain wealth, power, and intellectual recognition continued to adopt key elements of their host culture. This often meant acquiring proficiency in Arabic or Latin—languages that also had clear associations to Islamic or Christian scripture. It also required forging social and political ties with Muslim and Christian rulers, and regularly engaging in social situations that were shaped by non-­Jewish ideas and demands. Thus for the Jewish minority, the promise of coexistence always carried with it an implicit threat to Jews’ religious commitments and cultural heritage, or worse, the total abandonment of Judaism through conversion. This was a dilemma that Spain’s majority religious communities simply did not face. It is really only by viewing the phenomenon of convivencia from the point of view of both majority and minority groups that the disparate costs of coexistence begin to emerge. This book offers a portrait of Jewish history in medieval Spain that emphasizes the internal dynamics of Jewish society over Muslim-­Jewish or Christian-­Jewish relations. This approach allows for a closer consideration of the challenges and opportunities faced by different sectors of Jewish society and illustrates how success for some Jews often came at the expense of others. I will, of course, address the nature and development of the Jews’ relationship to their Muslim and Christian neighbors. But at the heart of this history lies the assumption that the more significant relationships were with members of their own religious community. Jewish communities in medieval Spain were small, with even the largest Jewish centers containing no more than a few hundred families. Nevertheless, they were closely knit, and however much Jews were integrated into the broader society, and however important their relations to Muslims and Christians may have been, Jewish life in Spain took place primarily among other Jews. In Spain, as in the rest of the medieval world, religious affiliation determined one’s status and general movement within the larger society. However, it would be misleading to imagine that attitudes toward members of other

4

Introduction

religious groups were solely determined by theology, unaffected by other human emotions. Medieval people, much like their modern counterparts, could be motivated by self-­interest, were subject to petty jealousies and fears, and were guided by a deep sense of love, friendship, and faith. The larger societies in which they lived often classified “the Jews” as an undifferentiated group. But this tendency, often found in Christian legal and religious texts, also obscures the textured reality of Jewish life. The central characteristics and concerns of Jewish society mirrored those of their Christian or Muslim neighbors. While medieval Jews did not, generally, engage in warfare, Jewish society was every bit as volatile and contentious as its Christian and Muslim counterparts. Great families vied with one another for power and prestige, while those occupying the lower orders of society complained bitterly of political disenfranchisement. Jews formed their own networks and rivalries, and battled with one another over communal power, individual freedom, and religious reform. These were defining characteristics of Jewish life under both Muslim and Christian rule, suggesting greater internal continuity in Jewish history than is often recognized. Even the Jews’ general relationship to the dominant society changed very little in their transition from Muslim to Christian rule. Jewish religious authorities were generally wary of political interference from the state. However, some Jews were quite willing to involve the outside authorities, and their communities’ subsequent dependence on royal or ecclesiastical power suggests a much more complex portrait of religious coexistence. Jews were every bit as interested in using personal wealth and power to articulate prestige and social difference within their own community, as were their Muslim and Christian counterparts. Prominent Jews developed strong bonds with Christian and Muslim officials to gain personal advantages and to promote their authority within their own Jewish communities. They obtained royal exemptions from communal taxes, and hired powerful non-­Jews to intimidate judges, debtors, and political or economic rivals within. They also sought to imitate the style, and subsequently the social status, of the Christian nobility, and thus further distinguished themselves from poorer and less prominent Jews. Such behavior elicited harsh criticism from a variety of camps. Many Muslims and Christians objected to Jewish social mobility, especially to their adoption of positions of honor and authority they thought should be prohibited to minorities. Jewish moralists also criticized these pretensions, arguing that they not only were impious but also prompted Muslim and Christian retribution on the whole Jewish community. Thus

Introduction

5

links to Christian or Muslim authorities forged by some Jews could simultaneously disadvantage others. Moreover, these interfaith relations often served to undermine Jewish communal independence. When well-­connected Jews successfully associated themselves with Christian and Muslim power, they forced their own communal governments to do the same. The result was a longstanding Jewish dependence on non-­Jewish political institutions. Approaching the Jewish experience from the point of view of the Jews reveals a society that was far more complex, and far more interesting, than has been generally portrayed. It was, in fact, a multifaceted society as varied as any in the medieval world. Focusing on Jewish attitudes and actions rather than on perceptions of the Jews held by others also helps us to better understand the function of interfaith relations in medieval Spain, providing greater insight into the concept of convivencia and deepening our appreciation of both Jewish and Spanish history.

Jewish Life in Spain, an Overview The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, a year that marks a clear end to their illustrious history. The beginning of that history is far cloudier. The roots of Jewish society in Spain stretch back to Roman Hispania, where Jews embraced elements of Roman culture while maintaining a distinct religious identity. As the Roman Empire embraced Christianity, early church councils sought to limit social and religious interaction between Christians and Jews and to strengthen the boundaries between the two communities. The legislation enacted at the Council of Elvira in the early fourth century suggests that Christians were still quite close to their Jewish neighbors, even intermarrying with them, and asking Jewish religious leaders to bless their crops. The problem of maintaining clear communal boundaries in a religiously and ethnically cosmopolitan society was one that would persist, in various forms, throughout the Middle Ages. With the fall of Rome, the Iberian Peninsula came under the control of the Visigoths, a Germanic people whose language, culture, and Arian Christianity distinguished them from their Catholic subjects who remained the majority of the population. While information from the period of Visigothic rule is scarce, there is evidence that Jews remained relatively well integrated into the surrounding society until King Reccared I abandoned Arianism for Catholicism in the year 589. Perhaps hoping to win support from

6

Introduction

their Catholic subjects and local church leaders, a series of Visigothic kings attempted to forcibly baptize the Jews in their realm. For more than a century, it seems, the kings and leading bishops of Visigothic Spain were preoccupied with converting the Jews and forcing them to accept Catholicism. The repeated introduction of legislation on this issue points to the failure of the enterprise, suggesting that these converts and their offspring continued to practice forms of Judaism, much to the displeasure of the Visigothic church.3 We have no information to corroborate these claims of heresy among the converted Jews, or to give us any detail as to what this crypto-­Jewish society might have looked like. And if Jewish communities managed to survive what appears to have been generations of persecution, they left no information as to their internal composition, their religious and intellectual life, or their ties to the wider Jewish world. Jewish life in Spain in the several centuries after the Muslim conquest of the region in 711 is similarly obscure. It is only in the tenth century, when a vibrant society coalesced around several remarkable figures, that a full exploration of Jewish life in Spain can begin. The Jews’ status as a protected minority determined their place within Andalusi society, but it was the complex relationships Jews maintained among themselves that gave shape to their daily lives. Those Jews with contacts to Muslim authorities, long-­distance trade networks, or other forms of wealth, power, and prestige lived very different lives from those Jews who did not. Thus although the remarkable and innovative intellectual culture produced by Jewish elites is an important emblem of the age, it offers a limited view of the social history of the Jew in al-­Andalus. Indeed, much of the pride in their cultural heritage and achievements helped to distance these elites from the rest of Jewish society, both in al-­Andalus and throughout the medieval Jewish world. The dynamic tension that bound separate factions of the Jewish community to one another became a defining characteristic of their society, and one that continued to shape the course of Sephardic history throughout the Middle Ages. The proud and combative society of Sephardic Jews that developed during the tenth century collapsed by the late twelfth century. As the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties came to power in al-­Andalus, they instituted anti-­ Jewish measures that culminated in forced conversions and a mass exodus of the region’s Jewish population. Many of the refugees who fled during this time came to settle in the lands of Christian Iberia and Provence, joining local Jews who had inhabited these lands for centuries. The period from the late twelfth through the early fourteenth century was thus one of cultural

Introduction

7

encounter between the Jewish subcultures of Muslim and Christian Spain. As these two Jewish subcultures attempted to blend into one, their leaders engaged in a series of bitter debates around the proper role of philosophy and mysticism in Judaism. These religious controversies roiled Jewish society for more than a century, threatening to tear it apart. In the end a tenuous compromise was achieved through the intervention of a small group of leading religious authorities. Nonetheless this protracted culture clash between the established Jewish communities of Christian Iberia and the Arabized Jewish immigrants from al-­Andalus suggests that the traditional division of medieval Sephardic history into an earlier, more cosmopolitan, Muslim period and a later, less productive, Christian period is too simplistic. It also highlights the need to pay close attention to developments within Jewish society and not just the Jews’ relationship with their Muslim and Christian neighbors. That said, interfaith relations could and did have an import impact on the course of Jewish history in the region. Just as Spanish Jews bridged the internal divisions within their society, they also confronted new dangers from without. The second half of the thirteenth century saw a marked increase in Christian anti-­Judaism in Spain, and these new religious tensions began to erode Jewish social and political status. Christian attitudes toward the Jews blended older religious teachings of mistrust and new social and economic antagonisms. The complex relationship among the Jews, the church, and the crown also increased the Jews’ reliance on royal protection, a relationship that would be repeatedly tested over the course of the late Middle Ages. The fourteenth century, in particular, was a period of turmoil. Developments in lending and debt collection simultaneously exacerbated the problem of Christian indebtedness to Jews and competition between Jewish and Christian lenders. For Christians, Jewish involvement in lending and tax-­ collecting were key aspects of their identity. Not only were these arguably the most important roles that Jews played in Christian society, they also supported Christian theological notions of the Jews and Judaism. Yet these were not the most common or most important jobs for the Jews themselves. Medieval Jewish society in Spain is more accurately characterized as one of artisans, not bankers, with many perennially living on the edge of poverty. Even as Christian attitudes hardened against them, Jews still managed to build a rich cultural and spiritual life. One of the hallmarks of Sephardic society during the fourteenth century was a significant increase in Hebrew literacy among a wider swath of the Jewish community, and with it a greater interest in pastoral care on the part of Jewish scholars. More Jews began to

8

Introduction

study religious texts, and Jewish preachers helped narrow the gap between intellectual elites and the rest of the Jewish community. These key developments provide an invaluable framework for understanding the more tragic events of the fourteenth century. Indeed, the history of Christian violence against the Jews that took place during this century calls out for attention and explanation. Traditionally, the anti-­Jewish episodes of the period have been seen as leading inexorably to the great riots of 1391, and to the subsequent unravelling of Jewish society that culminated in the expulsion of 1492. I suggest that we reconsider this narrative of a long and inevitable decline by locating these episodes of anti-­Jewish violence in their proper historical contexts. Rather than see anti-­Jewish riots such as those associated with the Black Death to be evidence of increasing Christian hostility, I understand them as a reflection of the general precariousness of Jewish life, and the way in which Jewish fortunes were bound up with their position as protected subjects of the crown. Moreover, attentive consideration of Jewish voices from this era suggests that such interreligious strife was not their primary concern. To be sure, Jews recognized and denounced the various religious, economic, and political factors leading to Christian hostility toward them. Nonetheless, it was the same set of pressures that led to Christian unrest— namely the destruction wrought by war, plague, and increased taxes—that most alarmed the Jews during the tumultuous fourteenth century. In the summer of 1391, however, anti-­Jewish riots swept over the peninsula and radically altered the course of Jewish history in Spain. Mobs of Christians fell upon one Jewish community after another, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake. But it was the creation of an entire subculture of Jewish converts (conversos) that had the most lasting impact on Spain’s Jewish and Christian communities. For some twenty-­five years following the riots, Castilian and Aragonese Jews were subjected to an intense missionizing campaign, as Christian secular and religious leaders sought to convert the region’s remaining Jewish population. Jews were forced to attend sermons by firebrand preachers, and their leading rabbis were harangued for almost two years at a mandatory public debate known as the Disputation of Tortosa. Many were unable to withstand the pressure of this ongoing campaign and followed their friends and neighbors in accepting baptism. The missionary fervor of these years ultimately fell short of its goal, and following 1415 the movement lost both its royal and popular support. The next decades saw the recovery and reorganization of the surviving Jewish communities. A return to traditional policies of royal protection brought a

Introduction

9

measure of stability to Jewish life, but the religious landscape of Spain had fundamentally changed. As the Jewish population dwindled, so did their economic contributions and thus utility to Spanish society. Perhaps more significant, they became permanently associated with the conversos, often called New Christians, who, in the minds of many so-­called Old Christians, were guilty of bringing Jewish ideas and practices into Christian society. By the time King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella came to power in the 1470s, the fate of the Jews had become inextricably bound up with the converso problem. The expulsion of the Jews was announced as a means to save New Christians from Jewish influence. By August 1492, the long, rich, and complicated history of the Jews in medieval Spain had come to an end. The present volume revisits this history with fresh insights, bringing together a wide array of sources that document Jewish life in medieval Spain. Still, there are limits to these sources and what they can tell us. We have far less information about Jewish life under Muslim rule than we do under Christian rule, and less about certain towns and regions of Christian Spain than others. Such is the case for the regions of Galicia and Navarre, in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, whose Jewish communities make an appearance toward the end of our story. Likewise, the Jews of Portugal remain peripheral to this study, for other reasons. While there were important connections between Portuguese and Castilian Jews during the later Middle Ages, the history of the Jews of Portugal forms enough of a distinct subject that it has generally been excluded here.4 Similarly, the history of the conversos is a fascinating subject all its own, and one that is far too large to treat here in any detailed way. It is addressed here only to the extent that it influenced the lives of professing Jews. Finally, there are sectors of the Jewish community, such as Jewish women and the poor, for which the extant sources tell us less than we would like. Notwithstanding these limitations, the following study seeks to present Jewish society in all its complexity. Whenever possible, I have attempted to highlight the distinct experiences and perspectives of various Jewish groups, and to acknowledge the diversity of medieval Jewish life. Situating the daily lives of Sephardic Jews within the broader context of medieval Spain, I hope to offer new vistas on this perennially fascinating period in both Jewish and Spanish history.

CHAPTER 1

At the Edge of the West Jewish Life in al-­Andalus

Perhaps the best introduction to the Jewish experience in Spain can be found in the enduring words of one of its greatest sons: Judah Halevi (1075–1141). In what are among the most famous lines in all Jewish literature, Halevi offers up a concise and moving summary of Jewish life in medieval Spain: My heart is in the East— and I am at the edge of the West. How can I possibly taste what I eat? How could it please me? How can I keep my promise or ever fulfill my vow, when Zion is held by Edom and I am bound by Arabia’s chains? I’d gladly leave behind me all the pleasures of Spain— if only I might see the dust and ruins of your shrine.1 Here the poet looks at the political geography of his day and sees a metaphor for a deeper, personal sense of spiritual alienation. Christians (Edom) control his ancestral homeland (Zion), while Muslims (Arabia) rule his native Spain. This situation has not prevented him from living a life of material success. But his wealth and the undeniable pleasures available to him in Spain only serve to intensify his longing for what Spain cannot provide: a fully realized religious life and the divinely promised redemption.

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Chapter 1

Halevi’s short poem touches on many of the characteristics that have come to define how we think about the history of Jews in the Middle Ages in general and in medieval Spain in particular: the day-­to-­day tension between earthly pleasures and religious obligation, the pain of living in exile amid triumphant Christian and Muslim civilizations, and a persistent sense of religious longing and social marginalization, all of which are rendered more poignant by Halevi’s own biography. Born in the late eleventh century, Halevi lived his life in Iberia’s Christian and Muslim cities, becoming the very model of a medieval Jewish Renaissance man. He was a successful merchant and respected physician, a rabbinic scholar and ardent defender of Judaism, and one of the most highly regarded poets in Jewish history. Yet as celebrated as he is—and, indeed, was, even in his own time—for these considerable achievements, what made him a truly heroic figure to centuries of Jews was his decision to turn away from the world of privilege. Near the end of his life, Halevi set out for Jerusalem, traveling from the edge of the Jewish world toward its heart, in the hope of finally glimpsing the “dust and ruins” of the ancient Temple. The resonance of Halevi’s story and the grand themes it encompasses have cast a mythic light on the history of Spanish Jewry. It is precisely this aura that makes the task of reconstructing Jewish history in the region such a challenge. There is no country in the medieval Jewish world for which we have so few historical facts and so many accreted legends as Muslim Spain, known as “al-­Andalus” in Arabic texts and as “Sepharad” in Hebrew. In contrast to the case for Christian Spain, we possess relatively little in the way of detailed historical information about Jewish life in al-­Andalus.2 The surviving Jewish works from this period include poetry, philosophy, and chronicles, which have fired the imagination of scholars for generations, giving rise to several different portraits of Jewish life in Muslim Spain. In the most enduring of these, a golden age of Jewish history in al-­Andalus was marked by great intellectual productivity and fruitful cultural exchange with the surrounding society. Sepharad here represents an ideal of diaspora life in which Jews are able to prosper economically, flourish intellectually, and integrate successfully into their host society, all while preserving a sense of piety and a shared religious identity.3 This chapter will reconsider this influential portrait of Jewish life in Muslim Spain. Using the lens of social history, it will focus on how different sectors of Jewish society experienced life in al-­Andalus during the High Middle Ages. This contextual approach will allow a more nuanced understanding of the intellectual contributions of Halevi and his cohort. Similarly, a closer look

At the Edge of the West

13

at the fault lines of Jewish society will afford a greater appreciation for the ingenuity and determination needed to produce the great achievements of Jewish culture during this period. Unfortunately, we know very little about Iberian Jewish society before the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba in the mid-­tenth century. A handful of sources attest to the presence of Jews in the region during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages but offer few details regarding the nature of Jewish life. When Muslim armies swept into the peninsula in 711, they encountered the remnants of a beleaguered Jewish community that had been subjected to religious persecution by Spain’s Christian Visigothic kings for more than a century. Royal and ecclesiastical legislation from the sixth and seventh centuries seems to show that the Jewish population had been forced to accept Christianity but were, however, still ostracized as “Jews”—despite their conversion.4 It is unclear just what sort of Jewish society existed in Spain in the eighth century, or if they welcomed the conquering Muslims as liberators, but for the next centuries, Iberian Jews would no longer be ruled by Visigothic Christians but by Arab and Berber Muslims. In the wake of Muslim expansion, Jews from the Near East moved westward, arriving in al-­Andalus as early as the ninth century and most likely for many years afterward.5 Many local Iberian Jews may have lived as nominal Christians for generations and practiced a form of crypto-­Judaism. Arabic-­speaking Jews, who were Arabized in language, dress, culture, and customs, now began to arrive in the peninsula. Their Jewish practice may have been rooted in a shared set of sacred traditions, but it also reflected distinct regional differences, especially with regard to prayer practices, legal traditions, and attitudes toward the adoption of non-­Jewish modes of thought. In general the standardization of rabbinic Judaism was still very much a work in progress during the early Middle Ages. While we have no concrete information regarding the encounter between the Arabized Jewish immigrants and the local Jews who had lived under Visigothic rule, we can safely assume that the task of building integrated communities was neither quick nor easy. We should not imagine a seamless and immediate cohering of these disparate groups of Jews into a unified Andalusi community with a shared identity and cultural outlook. How long, we might instead ask, did it take before the Iberian Jews living under Muslim control became thoroughly Arabized? How long before the Arabic language became dominant? At what point did the new artistic, literary, and architectural idioms take hold, and in what ways did they alter the Jewish cultural landscape in Iberia? We know that by the tenth century,

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Chapter 1

Arabic had become established as the lingua franca of the Islamicate world, including al-­Andalus. Arabic thus became the language of the intellectual and political spheres in which elite Andalusi Jews engaged and was most likely the vernacular of many Jewish homes in al-­Andalus. But this process was slow and, when one considers the whole of Andalusi Jewry, no doubt uneven. It is highly unlikely that native Jews who had accommodated to Roman and Visigothic culture abandoned it overnight. Far more likely, there would have been conflict between them and the new arrivals.

Umayyad Córdoba and the “New Jews” of the Tenth Century It is not until the tenth century that Jewish society in al-­Andalus first begins to come into focus. A remarkable series of Jewish courtiers and scholars were associated with the Umayyad court at Córdoba, and chief among these was Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a Jewish diplomat and patron of Jewish scholarship who came to serve Caliph ‘Abd al-­Rahman III in Córdoba and earned the honorific nasi (lit., “prince”) from his Jewish admirers.6 Just as the caliph strove to promote a sense of Andalusi unity and identity among his subjects, so too did Ibn Shaprut, except in his case, it was among the region’s Jews. In the earliest and most famous Jewish descriptions of Spain, Ibn Shaprut writes lovingly about his native land and the Jews who live there: “We, indeed, who are of the remnant of the Israelites, servants of my Lord the King, are dwelling peacefully in the land of our sojourning. The country in which we live is called in the sacred tongue Sepharad, but in the language of the Arabs . . . al-­Andalus. The land is fat, and rivers and springs and quarried cisterns abound. Wheat and corn cover the fields, the yield of which is great. And pleasant groves and gardens of various sorts are found.”7 This passage comes from a letter to Joseph, king of the Khazars, a semi-­ nomadic people settled in the Crimean region, who had, or so Ibn Shaprut had heard, converted to Judaism. Little is known about the historical fate of the Khazars and their purported conversion to Judaism. But the institutions and communal identity that Ibn Shaprut fostered among Andalusi Jews would have lasting effects. He represents a bridge from the most obscure period of Jewish life in the early centuries of Andalusi-­Muslim rule to what is often referred to as the “golden age” of Sephardic wealth, power, and intellectual productivity. Reflecting on Ibn Shaprut and his role in the rise of Córdoba as a leading rabbinic center, the Muslim chronicler Sa‘id al-­Andalusi confirms:

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He was the first to open the door and teach the Jews of al-­Andalus about their culture, their laws, and their history. Before him, the Jews of al-­Andalus had to resort to the Jews of Baghdad for information about their laws, their calendar, and the dates of their holy days, bringing from them the calculations for several years to help them understand the dates of their historic events and the beginnings of their years. But when Hasday [ibn Shaprut] got in touch with [Caliph] al-­Hakam, and was showered with his favors because of his ability, superb professionalism, talent, and manners, he asked for and received his master’s assistance in acquiring whatever he wanted from the writings of the Jews of the East. Then he taught the Jews of al-­Andalus the things they did not know before, thus making them abandon their difficult and costly methods.8 Of course, influential though he may have been, Hasdai ibn Shaprut was not the first Jewish courtier in al-­Andalus. His father, Isaac ibn Shaprut, had moved the family to Córdoba from the smaller town of Jaén. Even in a smaller regional center like Jaén, Jewish communal life at the time was, it would seem, already sufficiently developed and integrated into the surrounding Muslim society that Isaac had acquired a solid education in both Jewish and general subjects and gained access to wealth and influence, which brought him and his son to the attention of Muslim elites. Similarly, we can assume that Jews were already serving in advisory posts for other Muslim lords in Spain and North Africa, as they did in Baghdad and other centers in the East, and that ‘Abd al-­Rahman was familiar with this practice before deciding to employ Ibn Shaprut. Ibn Shaprut’s career marked a turning point in the evolution of Córdoba as a major Jewish center in al-­Andalus. As the power of Muslim Córdoba grew, so too did the stature of its Jewish community. And just as the Umayyads of Córdoba were rivals of the Abbasid Caliphate with its capital at Baghdad, the new Jewish elites of Córdoba began to assert their independence from the religious and intellectual leadership of the Baghdadi rabbis. Previously they, along with most other Jewish communities in the diaspora, had deferred to the religious expertise of the Geonim, the heads of the great Talmudic academics of Baghdad and Palestine. In local Jewish lore, Ibn Shaprut’s protégé, Moses ben Hanokh, was credited with enabling the Jewish community of Córdoba to establish its independence in religious matters from the Jewish authorities in Baghdad. “Prior to that, it was brought about by the Lord that

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the income of the academies which used to come from Spain, the land of the Maghreb, Ifriqiya, Egypt, and the Holy Land was discontinued. The following were the circumstances that brought this about.”9 These lines by the Jewish chronicler and philosopher Abraham ibn Daud open the most famous section of his Sefer ha-­Qabbalah (Book of Tradition), a work that offered an extended defense of the religious legitimacy of rabbinic Judaism. The account that follows, popularly known today as the “Story of the Four Captives,” is a legendary imagining of how the Jewish scholars of al-­Andalus broke from the religious institutions of Baghdad to establish the leading center for Jewish law and learning in the western Mediterranean. According to Ibn Daud, the Jewish community of Córdoba achieved religious autonomy from the East by appointing Moses ben Hanokh, an immigrant with connections to and formal training from the Geonic academies in Baghdad, as their leader and judge. Moses used his considerable knowledge to help establish a new Jewish center at Córdoba that would no longer need to rely on the Geonim of Baghdad for religious guidance. The story goes on to note that the Jews of Córdoba officially recognized Moses’s authority, allotting him a large stipend and the other trappings of communal leadership. Moreover, Ibn Daud points out that the installment of Moses as the head of the Jewish community won the enthusiastic support of the Umayyad caliph, ‘Abd al-­Rahman III, who “was delighted by the fact that the Jews of his domain no longer had need of the people of Babylonia [i.e., Baghdad].”10 With the support of Moses ben Hanokh from both the local Jewish community and the Muslim crown, the transfer of legitimate rabbinic authority from East to West was complete. According to our chronicler, Jews throughout the western Mediterranean promptly recognized the new status quo. “The report [of all this] spread throughout the land of Spain and the Maghreb, and students came to study under him. Moreover, all questions which had formerly been addressed to the academies were now directed to him. This affair occurred in the days of Rabbi Sherira, in about 4750, somewhat more or less.”11 This last passage echoes the story’s opening lines and would seem to bring the account to a close. At this point, however, Ibn Daud adds an interesting tangent that sheds some light on the nature of Jewish communal leadership at the time. He states that: “Moses the Rabbi allied himself by marriage with the Ibn Falija family, which was the greatest of the families of the community of Cordova, and took from them a wife for his son R. Hanok. [Subsequently,] the daughter of R. Hanok was married to one of the Ibn Falija family. Because of this, they are called by the surname Ibn Falija to this day.”12 Here, Ibn Daud

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notes that the assimilation of Moses and his descendants into a local family functionally ended the distinct Eastern (i.e., foreign) lineage of the great sage. The implication is that the authority of even a leading scholar still needed approval by the local oligarchy to be truly effective. Despite Ibn Daud’s picture of unanimous communal support for Moses ben Hanokh, it would have been highly unlikely that the leading families would simply step aside to make room for an outsider to become their leader. Rather, as was more typical throughout the premodern Jewish world, wealthy and powerful clans might seek to ally themselves with respected scholars as another means of solidifying their position within the community. Students might now direct their allegiance to the rabbis of Córdoba, rather than to those of Baghdad, but it was only with the total absorption of the lineage of Rabbi Moses into that of a local family that the transfer of power was complete. The inclusion of the phrase “to this day” in the twelfth-­century chronicle attests that the Ibn Falija family still proudly linked itself to one the founding fathers of rabbinic scholarship in al-­Andalus some two hundred years after the fact. Although Ibn Daud’s tale was as much a work of propaganda as it was history, both Moses and his son, Hanokh, were real historical figures. The decline of the Geonic academies of Baghdad and the subsequent rise of provincial rabbinic centers like the one at Córdoba represent two of the key developmental moments in the history of medieval Judaism. But perhaps more important for our subject, the particular mode of this transition tells us about the social history of Andalusi Jewry. As mentioned earlier, the arrival of Jewish immigrants in Muslim Iberia, from the eighth century on, posed a continuing challenge to local communities. The accommodation and integration of any sort of newcomers were problems enough, but immigrants with significant wealth, intellectual pedigree, or connections to the Muslim power structure would have been especially troubling to the ruling families who found their status and authority challenged.13 The power and patronage of Hasdai ibn Shaprut helped to make Córdoba a destination for talented and ambitious Jews from throughout Iberia and beyond. One way for local Jewish elites to deal with this development was to find a way to assimilate these newcomers into existing hierarchies of power through, for example, marriage, as Ibn Daud indicates, or through patronage, partnership, or similar accommodations. Another way was to reject them as unwelcome interlopers. During his long career, Ibn Shaprut was able to keep such nativist factions at bay by the sheer weight of his personal authority and his associations with the Muslim court. After his death and that of his protégé Moses ben Hanokh, however, the struggle for

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power over the religious and civil leadership of the community was brought into the open, illuminating the complex relationship between the emergent Jewish community at Córdoba and the older centers of the East. The two leading claimants for the rabbinic seat at Córdoba were Rabbi Moses’s son, Hanokh, on the one hand, and Moses’s protégé, Joseph ibn Abitur, who came from a well-­established family in the Andalusian town of Mérida, on the other. Ibn Abitur’s legal decisions continue to reflect the influence of the Baghdadi academies. He closely adhered to Geonic practice and seems to have considered their legislation as binding. Ties to the academies in the East had long had important sociopolitical corollaries.14 For generations, local prestige and power had accrued to individuals and families through their contacts with the academies of Baghdad and the Land of Israel, and from their ability to act as local arbiters of the legal traditions of the Geonim. Faced with a challenge to his position, Ibn Abitur first sought the backing of Ibn Shaprut’s successor at the Umayyad court. This was Jacob ibn Jau, a local silk merchant who had secured the caliph’s support in his quest to be the new titular head of the Jewish community at Córdoba. In contrast to the career of his famous predecessor, however, Ibn Jau’s tenure as nasi would be a short one. He was soon removed from office by the caliph’s chancellor, al-­ Mansur, and Ibn Abitur’s political fortunes began to decline. His carefully cultivated relationship with the ruling Umayyads had failed to secure him the leadership of the Jews of Córdoba, and he was forced to leave al-­Andalus. But in contrast to the neat transfers of power depicted in Ibn Daud’s chronicle, Ibn Abitur refused to accept his defeat with equanimity. Rather, Ibn Abitur quickly turned to outsiders for support. The Geonim, attempting to maintain their legal and political authority in the West, happily continued to grant Ibn Abitur their attention, even after his exile from al-­Andalus—to little avail, however. Ibn Abitur was obliged to cede leadership of Córdoba’s Jewry to his foreign-­born rival, Hanokh ben Moses. Though he was able to establish himself as a leading figure among the Jews of Palestine and Egypt, Ibn Abitur never abandoned his claim to be the rightful head of the Jews of Córdoba and carried on a protracted struggle against his Andalusi rivals from abroad.15 His longstanding, if fruitless, campaign illustrates how political factions within Córdoba’s Jewish community persisted through its rise to prominence. As we have seen, Hanokh’s victory was ultimately marked by his successful integration into Córdoba’s oligarchy through marriage into the Ibn Falija clan. If Ibn Daud’s tale presents a society in which religious and communal authority was effectively centered in Córdoba and its Jewish grandees, the

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political reality was far more complex. Courtiers such as Ibn Shaprut and Samuel ibn Naghrilla, who was vizier of Granada and may have held the rank of general in the Muslim military, came to power in Jewish society precisely because of the status they achieved in the wider Muslim world, not the other way around.16 And while there were certainly politically influential elites among the Jews in al-­Andalus, at least from the tenth through the twelfth century, their careers should not be taken as characteristic of Jewish political life during this period.

Jewish Communal Organization in al-­Andalus The Jews of Muslim Spain lived in small kehillot (communities; sing.: kehillah), independent of any large, regional institutions or social structures to bind them together. It is very difficult to offer more than a general estimation of the size of the Jewish population in Muslim Spain; we simply do not have sufficient data at our disposal. In large Jewish centers, such as Granada and Seville, estimates range from as many as four to five thousand to as few as eight hundred to nine hundred souls. It is worth noting that even the higher estimate for these important cities is relatively modest. When one considers that the average Jewish settlement was far smaller still, we get a clearer sense of Andalusi Jewry being composed of mostly small, close-­knit communities.17 Some of these kehillot reached great heights of cultural productivity, but they generally did not flourish for very long. Even the flourishing Jewish community at Córdoba was already declining by the early eleventh century. A Berber revolt led to the sack of the city in the years 1012 and 1013, and the Umayyad Caliphate collapsed in 1031. Over this period, leading Jewish intellectuals abandoned the city. The father of the Jewish poet and philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol, for example, moved his family to the city of Málaga. Similarly, the Jewish community of Granada was effectively destroyed in a wave of anti-­Jewish riots in 1066 and never recovered its status. The heydays of other Jewish communities were similarly brief. Lucena, at one point the region’s premier site for Jewish scholarship, began to thrive only with the arrival of the Moroccan legal scholar Isaac Alfasi, in the late eleventh century, but did not survive the death of Alfasi’s pupil, Joseph ibn Migash, in the mid-­twelfth century.18 We have no significant information about the Jews of Toledo until the mid-­eleventh century, just before the city passed into Christian hands.19 Thus even the largest and most prominent Jewish communities

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Chapter 1

in Muslim Spain endured for less than two centuries, and, for most, the period of real cultural flourishing appears to have been far briefer than that. The larger communities of Córdoba, Granada, and Lucena had their own histories. But other eras and regions tell us that there were significant differences between small communities and large ones, port cities and towns of the interior, communities with active centers of learning and those without. Moreover, even Muslim unity in the Iberian Peninsula was slow in coming, did not last long, and was relatively limited even at its peak under the caliphate of Córdoba. This was as true culturally as it was politically. Between the conquests of 711 and the collapse of Muslim power in Iberia in the thirteenth century, Andalusi Muslim society was fragmented by internal rivalries, cultural divisions, and intellectual factions. The small, feuding city-­states that both preceded and succeeded the caliphate were, in fact, the norm for al-­Andalus, as was a highly stratified society in which Arabs, Slavs, and Berbers were in constant tension with one another, despite sharing the same religion. The lack of communal unity among Andalusi Jews simply echoed the sociopolitical context of the dominant culture. Both groups were decentralized and fragmented along social, economic, and intellectual lines. As Andalusi Muslim society expanded in the ninth and tenth centuries, the demographic, intellectual, and economic development of the region’s Jews seems to have followed. Jews, like Muslims and Christians, lived in relatively small communities headed by a few wealthy elites, while most were artisans, laborers, and the poor. Unlike them, however, Jews tended to live in urban, rather than rural, settings. And Jews rarely seem to have engaged in warfare and raiding. Jewish political power was just as fragmented as that of Muslim elites. During the caliphate an important Jewish scholar in Córdoba might have more prestige than one in another Andalusi city, but even when Muslim power was at its most centralized, he would hardly have been able to influence Jewish religious or political life beyond the city of Córdoba itself.20 Moreover, Muslim caliphs and the various princes who arose after the caliphate’s collapse did not have a relationship with the Jewish community per se, nor did they confer authority on a Jewish leader, even one chosen by the Jews, as appears to have happened in Abbasid Baghdad.21 Instead, the Muslim rulers of al-­Andalus ruled their Jewish subjects through direct decrees or through Jewish members of their court. It was due to his preexisting relationship with the caliph that Ibn Shaprut was considered—by both the caliph and

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other Jews—to be the de facto leader of the Jewish community. The details of how rabbinic leaders or Jews from other cities related to such courtiers were of little interest to Muslim rulers; they left the Jews to figure out such matters on their own. Jewish political authority was thus highly localized but also highly un­stable. In theory Jews living in a given town were supposed to form a single community, which would include groups of Jews living in the adjacent small villages. Each local community, independent of the rest, was to be governed by a council of duly elected officials and legal authorities. The reality was far less standardized and neatly hierarchical. Rabbis and judges in one community would appeal to authorities in other communities with whom they had ties, or who possessed a truly stellar scholarly reputation. Scholars and patrons moved, and centers of rabbinic scholarship shifted. Andalusi Jews appear to have maintained ties with their colleagues elsewhere, in North Africa, especially those in Qayrawan, as well as in the Near East. The average Jew, however, likely would have accepted the authority of his local judges and communal officials with little thought as to the latter’s allegiance to more famous religious authorities in Córdoba, Qayrawan, or Baghdad. Access to positions of communal authority were usually restricted to a few wealthy families and to those poorer Jews with significant talents or intellectual abilities whom the rich agreed to patronize. Here, as was typical throughout the premodern world, Jewish society was comprised of a loose association of independent local communities typically governed by an oligarchy of leading families. While upward social mobility was certainly possible in these communities, those in power naturally sought to control access to positions of authority. Local governing councils were generally comprised of leading merchants, physicians, and other learned men, some of whom were in service to Muslim rulers. These elites were also geographically mobile, especially those whose political fortunes rose and fell along with those of their Muslim patrons. As a result these worldly and well-­traveled merchants, courtiers, and intellectuals tended to form closer ties with one another than with many of the other Jews in their own communities. These ties, and the wealth that generally accompanied them, gave those in the upper strata of Jewish society access to power beyond the means of poorer Jews. As was common throughout the medieval Mediterranean world, when those of their own community proved unwilling or unable to grant them legal satisfaction, Jews had recourse to Muslim and Christian authorities. Dealing with these authorities, however, often involved extra payments, or bribes, and was thus limited to families of

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means. Hebrew loan contracts from this period state explicitly that if a Jewish debtor delayed repayment, his Jewish creditor would be free to go the Muslim authorities and pay them the customary bribe, so that they would force the Jewish debtor to repay the debt.22 The relatively diffuse nature of Jewish self-­government, paradoxically, helped the Jews survive some of the political turbulence of the period. The decline of the caliphate of Córdoba in the 1030s and the subsequent breakup of al-­Andalus into independent principalities, or taifas, did not signal disaster for Andalusi Jews. On the contrary, it initiated a proliferation of competing princely courts, beginning a period of enormous cultural productivity among the Jews. The division of Andalusi society into these city-­states benefited Jewish courtiers in particular, multiplying the number of positions open to Jewish elites. However, the heyday of the Jewish courtier was one of stagnation for other sectors of Jewish society. During the taifa period, Jewish immigration to al-­Andalus from other parts of the Jewish world began to slow. From the eleventh century onward, the same political instability that offered new opportunities for Jewish courtiers also deterred Jews from other regions from moving to al-­Andalus.23

Poverty, Violence, and the Insecurity of Daily Life The poverty and violence endemic to medieval society as a whole were integral parts of Jewish daily life as well. For many Jews life was lived on the brink of poverty, and for those who sought to travel by land or sea, the danger of capture was a constant threat.24 Providing relief for the poor and ransoming Jewish captives were religious and practical requirements incumbent upon Jews. While individual communities generally sought to limit their civic responsibilities to their own members, there nonetheless existed private networks of Jewish families and their associates that would step in to help. As one might imagine, the logistics involved in getting aid to those in immediate need were complex and sometimes difficult to carry out, given human nature. Some of the earliest references to Jewish self-­government in al-­Andalus mention the regular collection of funds for the poor, and the legal and logistical problems that ensued when, in one instance, the charitable funds were stolen.25 Similarly, although the civic obligation to redeem captives was one that Jews took very seriously, the task of raising funds was never easy. Ibn Daud

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presents the redemption of Moses and his son Hanokh as part of a regular practice of redeeming captives. In his account, the Jews of Córdoba are portrayed as acting out of respect for Jewish law, rescuing fellow Jews whom they believed to be impoverished and uneducated and thus of little value to the community. There is no mention of protracted negotiations with Moses’s captors or complaints over wasting communal funds on Jews who would most likely be a financial burden on the community. As with so much of Ibn Daud’s idealized tale, the reality may have been quite different. Throughout the medieval Mediterranean, Jewish communal leaders went to great lengths to cajole members of their congregations to donate funds, including public descriptions of the torture and deprivation suffered by captives. At other times they relied on the efforts of well-­connected individuals, which were sometimes more effective. In one case an independent agent traveled between Valencia and Denia, collecting ransom funds from the relatives of a Jew being held captive. Here it seems no Jewish community took responsibility for collecting the ransom, either because they were unwilling or ­simply because family ties could often prove to be the most efficient means of social action. In another instance the poet Judah Halevi helped spearhead a campaign to collect funds from Jewish communities in Muslim and Christian Spain to ransom a Jewish woman being held in Toledo. It is unlikely that he sent requests to the governing boards of each community. Rather, just as the woman’s father contacted the prominent Egyptian merchant Halfon ben Netanel, who in turn contacted Halevi through their mutual friend Judah ibn Ghiyyat, we must imagine that the money was collected through Halevi’s personal and business networks.26 This brief mention of the captive woman signals yet another deficiency in our knowledge of Jewish life in Muslim Spain. If we possess very little documentation on Andalusi Jews in general, we possess even less with regard to Jewish women of this period. Women made up half of society, though few, if any, lived lives as poets, philosophers, courtiers, or rabbis. To be sure, women did engage in business and were involved in various sectors of the economy, but their economic activities were marginal compared to those of men, and they were usually financially dependent on husbands and male relatives. Jewish women could be active in the financial management of their families, including business transactions and repayment of loans with Jews and Muslims alike. Jewish women also managed their family’s businesses when their merchant-­husbands were on the road, but they do not appear in our records as itinerant merchants in their own right.27

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We do, nevertheless, have glimpses of women successfully asserting themselves within the Jewish community. Technically, Jewish law forbade women to sue for divorce; instead, such declarations had to come from their husbands. However, unhappy wives were often able to find a way to force the hands of their spouses. We know that, in various parts of the Muslim world, Jewish authorities granted divorces to those wives who were determined to leave their husbands. A court document from eleventh-­century Lucena illustrates how this process worked. It states: We the undersigned went as emissaries of Rabbi so and so the judge, may his Rock guard him, to so and so the daughter of master so and so, to appease her for her husband, master so and so, who complained for an extended time and claims that she does not perform for him any of the tasks which wives are obligated to perform for their husbands. Moreover, he claims that she won’t come into the same house with him. We tried to appease her, but were unsuccessful. She paid no attention to our words. Rather, she said “I do not want this husband of mine” twice. She raised her voice demanding divorce and cursed this man, her husband, while he kept quiet. That which took place in our presence we have written and signed, in month such and such.28 Although shorn of the original names of the participants, this text nonetheless provides a small window onto the world of medieval Jewish life. While the husband in this case seems to have been equally unhappy with the state of the marriage, he appears to have been intent on remedying the situation rather than divorcing his wife. It was the wife who decided to dissolve the marriage and who eventually succeeded, despite legal impediments to her agency in such matters. The document seems to reflect a society in which communal representatives attempted—pragmatically—to preserve a ­couple’s marriage as best they could, while trying at the same time to protect the viability of Jewish law. Allowances were made when the particulars of a case made the implementation of the letter of the law untenable. In other cases we see a society in which Jewish women proved willing to test the boundaries of Jewish communal authority in order to protect their own property. In one circumstance a Jewish woman went to a Muslim judge to protect real estate she possessed by virtue of her ketubah (marriage contract) from being sold by her husband. Joseph ibn Migash, before whom this case was brought, gave his consent to this practice.29

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Economic Life at the “Edge of the West” The tenth century, which so dramatically marks the rise of Jewish political and intellectual culture in al-­Andalus, also appears to have been a major turning point for Jewish economic expansion, ending a long period of relative stagnation. From this period onward, Andalusi Jews contributed significantly to the local economies of the towns and cities in which they lived. They developed previously unused lands, bringing fallow soil into cultivation. They owned land, alone or together with other Jews or non-­Jews.30 Those who were wealthy enough to own land generally contracted tenant farmers and regularly purchased real estate as an investment for capital earned in trade or in banking. We have evidence of this from as early as the mid-­tenth century, when a legal question directed at Moses ben Hanokh mentioned a certain Jew whose business acumen was so bad that it was suggested that he invest in land mortgages, where he could at least reap the fruits of his property, rather than in merchant or other business partnerships.31 Additionally, some Jews in Muslim Iberia cultivated land directly, working as tenants for Jewish landowners. The prevalence of vineyards among the documented properties owned by Jews suggests that wine was an important part of their diet, as it was for their Christian counterparts.32 The Jews of Muslim Spain were also part of a vast mercantile network that bound together Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. When Hasdai ibn Shaprut wrote his famous description of al-­ Andalus, he made particular note of the region as a major center for trade. He boasts that his native land was one rich in gold, silver, and other precious commodities “for which merchants come from all corners of the land. And from every region and the distant islands of the sea, traders stream to it, from Egypt and the adjacent countries, bringing perfumes and spices and precious gems.”33 Yet as with the rest of Ibn Shaprut’s portrayal, his depiction of al-­ Andalus as a major center for long-­distance trade should be taken with a grain of salt. In fact, the role played by Andalusi Jews in Mediterranean trade was relatively modest.34 Relatively few Jewish mercantile networks stretched from Iberia to India, and they were as likely to trade in flax and linen cloth as in silver and spices. Indeed, a closer look at Andalusi Jewish participation in Mediterranean trade can help place both Andalusi Jewry and the broader portrait of medieval Jewish trade networks into greater perspective.35 Jewish commerce was primarily local and regional, and periods of affluence and productivity were often quite fleeting. Almería, which served as a

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Chapter 1

principal port for Jewish merchants, flourished from the mid-­tenth to the mid-­eleventh century and then ceased to be a site of Jewish commercial activity. Similarly, the Jewish community in the port city of Denia appears to arise almost out of nothing toward the end of the tenth century and then disappears by the twelfth century. As markets dried up in one town or another, Jewish merchants were forced to resettle their families. A rabbinic responsum from the period mentions a man who “had married a woman some years ago, but merchandise became scarce in that town and did not suffice for his live­ lihood, so he told her to come with him to another place.”36 Moreover, direct involvement in long-­distance trade, even at the best of times, was limited. The Jews of al-­Andalus truly were at the “edge of the West,” to use Halevi’s famous phrase. During the High Middle Ages, Jews plied the Mediterranean as a large free-­trade zone stretching the length of the great sea from Spain to Egypt and beyond. Yet journeys that spanned the entirety of this zone were not all that common, even in the heyday of Jewish long-­distance trade (roughly 1000 to 1150). While travel along the routes of the eastern Mediterranean was considered quite ordinary, the prospect of reaching its western shores was more daunting. Most of the Jewish merchants who traveled through the Mediterranean at this time did not move freely to and from Spain. Couriers who carried letters between Jewish communities were an indispensable part of the communications systems needed to support these mercantile networks. They, however, were not willing to travel unlimited distances, and none, as far as we know, regularly traversed the entire distance between Egypt and al-­Andalus.37 Thus while the Jews of al-­Andalus were in theory part of these larger trading networks, their participation in them was marginal and generally relegated in the western Mediterranean.38 Additionally, Jewish trade extended beyond the Islamicate lands of the southern Mediterranean. Jewish merchants from all over Iberia traded with the communities of Christian Europe as well, although here, too, the scale of trade was quite modest. Jews from Muslim Saragossa traveled north into France during the ninth century, and rabbinic responsa from Lucena record Jews from France traveling to al-­Andalus in the eleventh century.39 It is also hard to speak of Andalusi Jewish traders collectively, as a national group representing their region in world trade. Instead small, often competing bands of Andalusi Jews were part of some Mediterranean mercantile networks but not others. Individual and family interests far outweighed regional sensibilities.40 Jewish trading was thus only one part of a diverse local economy generally dominated by artisans and agricultural laborers.41 Indeed, in the extant responsa literature from the period, queries regarding agriculture—especially

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viticulture—and land ownership are far more prevalent than those regarding trade. Most Andalusi Jews were local, small-­scale farmers, artisans, shop-­ owners, peddlers, and pawnbrokers—not long-­distance traders. They tended to make their living from humble occupations, regularly combining skilled labor with some small-­scale mercantile activity. In addition to the typical Jewish jobs of tanning, dyeing, and weaving, other Jewish occupations ranged from selling medicines and foodstuffs, to carving coral, stringing pearls, sewing and embroidering, and digging wells.42 The fact that Jewish artisans and peddlers shared local communities and neighborhoods with those involved in the more lucrative long-­distance trade is a point that merits careful consideration. Those few who succeeded in establishing profitable trade networks could become alienated from others within their home communities. A rabbinic responsum from the eleventh century hints at a communal norm in which many Jews found themselves disconnected from merchant networks and the wealth they could bring. It makes reference to the deathbed will of a Jew who states that he is not able to leave his widow any money, “neither in large nor small denomination,” since he was not a merchant.43 Socioeconomic stratification is key to understanding the internal character of these local Andalusi Jewish communities. Establishing bonds of mutual trust was the foundational social component in medieval trade networks. Exclusion from such relationships was equally significant. That is, we must also consider relationships among Jews of the same local community where mutual trust or commitment did not exist or was not fostered by common economic or social interests. To be sure, merely by belonging to the same community one shared responsibilities to the state, such as taxes, and experienced a common fate in times of political upheaval. Yet those bonds could easily be tested when they conflicted with ties to Jews—and non-­Jews— beyond the kehillah. In such instances, how did Jews prioritize relationships? Involvement in trade networks, intellectual circles, and service to non-­Jewish lords bound a segment of medieval Jews to people beyond their local community and consequently distanced them from others within it.

Jewish-­Muslim Relations in al-­Andalus Attempting to define the Jews’ status in predominantly Muslim societies over many centuries is a perilous project. Jewish fortunes differed from one region to the next, waxed and waned over time, and were shaped by a

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host of political, economic, and social factors. And yet important observations can still be made about how Jewish-­Muslim relations shaped Jewish life in al-­Andalus during the tenth to twelfth centuries. For the Jews of this period, as throughout the medieval world, religious identity determined their overall status in society. Islamic religious tradition categorized Jews as ahl al-­dhimma, or “dhimmis”—that is, nonbelievers granted protection and certain limited rights within Islamic society, as long as they adhered to specific guidelines. This status allowed for a level of social integration but still branded Jews as outsiders in a society already organized around religious identity and law. This distinction between Muslim and dhimmi was fundamental to Muslim self-­perception, just as the division of Jews (“Israel”) and non-­Jews (“the nations”) was central to the Jewish worldview. Many of the Muslim chronicles of al-­Andalus were written long after the events they describe, and many were written by Islamic jurists (fuqaha), who were charged with interpreting and expounding correct forms of moral and religious behavior, as dictated by Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). For this reason they generally reflected religious ideals rather than social reality. As always, religious rulings could be softened or even ignored by rulers, magistrates, and the general populace, depending on the situation. However, one notable theme, repeated in several sources, is that humility was expected by dhimmis. Jarringly successful Jews were depicted as arrivistes who have risen above their proper social station.44 Indeed, the humiliation of dhimmis was essential to their differentiation from Muslims. This does not mean that all Jews were forced to suffer public humiliation at all times, but that a certain degree of public humiliation was generally expected. Thus the social expectation was that Jews (and Christians) would forgo overt expressions of pride, honor, and ostentation. This expectation could be discounted—or enforced—depending on historical context. At times dhimmis were treated in a straightforward manner as “protected peoples,” while at others they were conflated with dishonorable and undesirable groups, from lepers and libertines to those in league with Satan.45 Muslim rulers could enforce this status lightly or stringently, as they saw fit. Still, preachers and other religious leaders who might be popular with the masses reserved the right to criticize political rulers if they thought the latter had lost their way. This underlying tension between majority and minority did not preclude interreligious partnerships and even friendships. Jewish courtiers served Muslim rulers as diplomats, physicians, tax-­collectors, and even viziers, and there is also evidence of Jewish musicians performing at the courts

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of Andalusi rulers.46 On some occasions we read of Muslim intellectuals engaging with their Jewish counterparts, as was the case with the eleventh-­ century Jewish physician and scientist Abu Ibrahim Isaac ibn Yashush, who was influential in Jewish and Muslims intellectual circles. Likewise, poetry written by both Jews and Muslims mentions sexual longing and liaisons that took place across religious lines.47 It is always hard to know how much artistic expressions reflect social reality, but at the very least, it indicates a milieu in which interfaith relations were theoretically possible. Jewish intellectuals and physicians worked and maintained friendships with Muslims of similar social rank. It is not hard to imagine that similar relationships developed among Jewish and Muslim laborers and artisans. Indeed, some evidence of interfaith relations beyond the elites does exist. In one instance, a Jew sought to donate a house to a mosque in Córdoba, and in another a Jew directed a portion of his property to be given to his daughter on condition that, if she did not have any children, the money would then go to poor Muslims of the town of Lorca. Jews and Muslims formed business partnerships, appealed to Muslim judges to resolve financial matters, and traveled together in the same caravans.48 However, close as these interfaith relationships often were, they were fundamentally asymmetrical. The essential division of society into the community of believers (‘umma) and protected peoples (ahl al-­dhimma) militated against real large-­scale symbiosis. By the ninth century most Andalusi Jews were thoroughly Arabized. They had come to adopt the essential linguistic and cultural norms of the larger society, opening the door to a higher degree of social integration. Yet such cultural blending was hardly reciprocal. While educated Jews read and wrote Arabic, medieval Muslims, no matter how cultured, did not seem to read Hebrew. For Andalusi Muslims the Arabic language and the various cultural forms associated with it were inherently tied to the Qur’an and thus to Islamic theology and law. Muslim intellectuals’ concern with religious purity, and an associated disgust toward Jews, can be seen in Andalusi legal treatises from the ninth to twelfth centuries.49 Thus while friendly intellectual contacts between Muslims and Jews did exist, and in at least some cases Muslims learned from Jewish teachers, such interactions took place against a backdrop of formal denigration of the Jews and Judaism. This expectation of Jewish social subjugation should not be underemphasized. Dhimmi status meant that Jews were commonly relegated to the most undesirable positions in society. These included jobs as jailers and executioners, and more commonly as tanners, weavers, and dyers, all of which were

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considered degraded occupations and placed Jews at the lowest rung of the social ladder.50 More than just social superiority and religious difference, this denigration meant that Judaism became synonymous with heresy. Throughout the Muslim world, Jews were associated with symbols of betrayal and the stubborn rejection of truth and goodness, due not only to their refusal to accept Islam but also to the particular way the early Jewish rejection of Muhammed and his message was portrayed in Islamic texts and tradition. In various Muslim intellectual circles, the term “Jew” could be a derogatory slur when used against fellow Muslims, usually as a response to doctrinal differences (e.g., the Shi’ites are the “Jews of our community”).51 Popular scorn of Jews and Judaism was such that, in many instances, even conversion to Islam could not mitigate it. Despite their embrace of Islam, many Jewish converts continued to be ostracized and were more readily associated with political corruption and palace intrigues than other Muslims.52 Other factors that could determine how individual Muslims and Jews related to each other included personal need, position in one’s own society, and intellectual tendencies. These things mattered a great deal—people in each religious community were interested in defending and enhancing their own status and that of their family, lineage, and intellectual circle as much as they were in representing Islam or Judaism per se. In this quest for personal advancement, they made use of a variety of ideas, calumnies, laws, and so forth that were at their disposal. Thus anti-­Jewish tropes could be invoked or ignored as each Muslim ruler or intellectual saw fit. Nonetheless, when anti-­ Jewish attitudes were articulated, either in laws, sermons, poetry, or polemics, their deleterious effect on popular Muslim opinions was hard to undo. Therefore, although Muslim rulers regularly protected their Jewish subjects and privileged small groups of Jewish courtiers for their own political benefit, Muslim theology and popular culture maintained negative images of the Jews that were easily and regularly called forth.

The Jewish Courtier Nowhere was the complex relationship between Jews and Muslims more visible than in the ties between Jewish courtiers and Muslim rulers. It was precisely because of Jews’ weak political status that Muslim rulers allowed small numbers of Jewish notables to hold important positions as court physicians,

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tax-­collectors, and advisers. Since Jews could not become caliph or emir, nor raise their own armies, they were not feared as political or military rivals. Their dependence on the largesse and protection of their Muslim lords thus offered a guarantee of fealty not found among Muslim elites who might win popular support and make a case for their own legitimacy as leaders of the faithful. In borderlands such as al-­Andalus, the Christian minority also posed a threat, since they were always suspected of maintaining religious and political allegiances with the powerful Christian states to the north. But the high status and high visibility of Jewish courtiers also made them targets of professional jealousies and popular enmity. Royal officials, particularly tax-­ gatherers, were often denounced for abusing royal trust to serve their own purposes. Jews in the service of the royal court were doubly suspect as religious outsiders. In times of instability, they became symbols of political greed and corruption, and easy targets for religious reformers seeking to criticize their rulers on behalf of a beleaguered populace.53 No courtiers were more controversial or symbolic of the highs and lows of Jewish life in al-­Andalus than Samuel ibn Naghrilla and his son Joseph. Samuel, known to Jews by the honorific title nagid (“prince,” or “leader”), was a spice merchant and legal scholar who lived in Mérida, Córdoba, Málaga, and eventually Granada, where he came to serve the Zirid dynasty. ­Samuel’s considerable intellectual abilities, as displayed in his poetry and religious writing, must also have been evident in his command of Arabic and general political acumen. A popular legend found in Ibn Daud’s Book of Tradition states that the vizier of Granada came upon examples of Samuel’s writing and was so impressed that he made the Jewish merchant his secretary. However he first made this transition, Samuel rose through the ranks of the taifa’s governing structure, from tax-­gatherer to secretary and eventually to vizier of Granada and general in charge of a Muslim army, all the while acting as a spokesman and leader of the Jewish community. His fame and influence in both Jewish and Muslim society were unrivaled, a fact that brought him admirers and adversaries from both communities. The eleventh-­century Muslim chronicler Ibn Hayyan of Córdoba famously described Ibn Naghrilla in terms that lauded his personal qualities, despite his unfortunate adherence to what was regarded as an inferior religious tradition. This cursed man was a superior man, although God did not inform him of the right religion. . . . He was an extraordinary man. He wrote both languages: Arabic and Hebrew. He knew the literatures of both

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peoples. He went deeply into the principles of the Arabic language and was familiar with the words of the most subtle grammarians. He spoke and wrote classical Arabic with the greatest ease, using his language in the letters which he wrote on behalf of his king. He used the usual Islamic formulas, the eulogies of God and Muhammad, our Prophet, and recommended the addressee live according to Islam. In brief, one would believe that his letters were written by a pious Muslim.54 Here Ibn Hayyan asserts that Ibn Naghrilla so thoroughly embodied the qualities of a true man of culture (‘adib) that he could pass for a pious Muslim. Such observations were not lost on other Jewish elites who recognized that proficiency in Arabic offered them a means to attain status, wealth, and power. In his own writing Ibn Naghrilla openly criticized Jewish and Muslim intellectuals alike, and compared his own career as a poet-­warrior to that of the biblical King David. Such displays of bravado were not always well received. Ibn Bassam of Santarem, a Muslim poet and historian who wrote in the generation after Samuel ibn Naghrilla, vigorously attacked the Jewish courtier and his Muslim supporters. Such polemical works were by no means limited to Muslim-­Jewish relations. They were part of a literary culture in which attacking the abilities and status of others was a means of asserting one’s own honor and authority. Nonetheless, participants who were members of religious minorities were readymade targets for excoriation and moral outrage. And unlike polemical attacks among members of the same religion, those aimed at minorities were easily broadened to include all members of the community. When the great Muslim scholar Ibn Hazm wrote his polemical treatise Refutation of Ibn Naghrilla the Jew, his attacks on Ibn Naghrilla for defaming Islam were extended to include all Jews.55 Perhaps the most infamous example of a literary attack on a Jewish courtier that included a denunciation of the wider Jewish community and its status is an ode (qasida) written by the eleventh-­century Muslim jurist Abu Ishaq of Elvira. The author had been the chief judge in Granada before falling out of favor with the city’s rulers, and his polemic is bound up with his personal feelings of bitterness and desire for revenge against his perceived enemies. Chief among these was Joseph ibn Naghrilla, who had succeeded his father, Samuel, as a powerful advisor at the royal court, and was apparently a rival of Abu Ishaq. Such personal motives notwithstanding, his qasida still offers a window into the sorts of anti-­Jewish attitudes that were thought to resonate with local Muslims at the time. Indeed, the author’s main point is the need

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to enforce a social hierarchy in which the Jews, collectively, know their place. “Put them back where they belong, and reduce them to the lowest of the low, roaming among us with their little bags, with contempt, degradation and scorn as their lot, scrabbling in the dunghills for colored rags to shroud their dead for burial. . . . Turn your eyes to other countries and you will find that Jews are outcast dogs.”56 For both Abu Ishaq and his intended audience, the social norm for Jews in the Muslim world was for them to be both visible and systematically humbled, a position supported by Islamic legal doctrine. That this social norm was not universally upheld, as our author laments, did not diminish its power. In December 1066, shortly after Abu Ishaq wrote these lines, a popular uprising against Granada’s Jewish community led to its destruction and the death of Joseph ibn Naghrilla.57 Other Jews were well aware of how quickly Muslim wrath at Jewish elites could be visited on the whole community. Jewish moralists offered sharp critiques of the pride and ostentation of Jewish courtiers.58 And while large-­ scale violence against Jews was rare, Jews lived with the knowledge that such outbreaks were always possible. Jewish vulnerability was made clear during periods of political instability and chaos. In addition to the Granada massacre of 1066, the Jewish neighborhood of Córdoba had been pillaged during the political upheaval surrounding the collapse of the caliphate earlier in the century. Accounts of these riots are not particularly reliable or easily corroborated, however, and we don’t know the extent of the devastation. Whatever the actual course of events, the reports of the riots and the destruction of Granadan Jewry passed into memory for both Muslims and Jews, creating a history of animosity and distrust with its own enduring power. Later generations of medieval Jews and Muslims who read or heard these accounts would have no trouble believing them, as they conformed to a worldview they knew quite well. Jews would understand the massacre as divinely ordained and yet humanly unjust, as they did with most such attacks. The victims would be mourned, and Jews would seek forgiveness from God for their collective sins, in the classic fashion. Their rabbis would underscore the vagaries of fate—as well as the danger of courtiers who rise above their station. For their part, Muslims would see divine and royal justice being meted out, and faith in the ruling classes reaffirmed. In sum, we need first to acknowledge that both physical violence and other forms of aggression were parts of daily life in medieval societies and were universally employed as mechanisms to set and enforce social and political hierarchies.59 And second, in a world where religion and religious identity

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were essential to the structuring of the social order, nonbelievers were understood to be at best inferior to believers, and at any rate expected to maintain a markedly lower position in society.

Language and Identity Marginalized though they were as a religious minority, the Jews nonetheless embraced the Arabic culture of al-­Andalus as their own. Throughout the medieval world, Jews spoke the language of their surrounding society, while their “sacred tongue,” Hebrew, was primarily reserved for liturgical and literary use. In Muslim Spain the primary form of written communication among Jews—from personal and business letters to most intellectual compositions—was Arabic. This Arabic did not differ substantially from that used by their Muslim neighbors, although it was usually written using Hebrew characters, a combination that is often referred to as Judeo-­Arabic. Menahem ibn Saruq argued that Hebrew was not divine per se, but that it was a chosen language just as Israel was a chosen people—a theme that, as we have seen, would become popular in much of Andalusi Jewish writing. In a world of exile in which most Jews had forgotten the language of their ancient homeland, Andalusi Jewish writers declared that the Jews of Sepharad had maintained their knowledge of Hebrew. Ibn Saruq’s claims became the cornerstone of Sephardic identity during this period, at least among a certain class of intellectuals. The eleventh-­century grammarian Moses ibn Gikatilla, wrote: “The sacred language was sunken among secular languages.” For Gikatilla and his contemporaries, it would be the poets and grammarians of Jewish Spain—of Sepharad—who would return Hebrew to its rightful place of prominence in medieval Jewish society.60 In the works of early Sephardic authors, the themes of language, religion, and national identity overlap. It was a longstanding Jewish notion that the state of the world had declined, for example. This meant that it was of increasing importance that men like Moses ibn Gikatilla and fellow grammarian and poet Moses ibn Ezra could keep alive the memory and understanding of the sacred tongue. Likewise, in his introduction to The Book of Tahkemoni, Judah Alharizi explained that he was motivated by the desire to “show the power of the holy language to the holy people,” and, we might add, to demonstrate his own considerable linguistic prowess. Alharizi presented

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the scholars of his native Sepharad as virtually the only Jews in the world who had any true command of Hebrew. Prowess in Hebrew was directly tied to religious authority, through the field of biblical exegesis. Establishing the correct method for interpreting sacred Jewish texts was taken seriously, and in many ways was the driving force behind much of the intellectual productivity of medieval Jews, especially in Spain. It was also a source of the nearly perpetual disputes and rivalries among intellectual factions within the Jewish society, each one claiming true piety and Jewish tradition. In his defense of his own exegetical method, Moses ibn Ezra wrote: “After quoting the Arabs’ Qur’an, I do not experience the same disgust that some hypocrites among the sages of our community nowadays claim to experience, as I have seen that the greatest jurists and the most important Mutakallimun, such as Rabbi Sa’adia, Rabbi Hai, and other theologians do also rely on it to solve the absurd aspects of the prophecies. . . . They even resort to Christian exegesis, in spite of its little basis. However, this group [of opponents I have referred to] pays great attention and looks in detail at the minutiae when they are blind to their own monstrosities.”61 This passage shows the inherently polemical and harsh character of Jewish intellectual life. The greatest rivalries were not between Jewish scholars and those from other religious communities but among various factions within the Jewish intelligentsia.62 The grammatical work of the tenth century became a foundation for a new form of biblical exegesis based on the philological exposition of the biblical text. This revolution was centered in al-­Andalus, and one of its leaders was the tenth-­century Moroccan émigré, Judah Hayyuj. Hayyuj was the first great bible scholar and grammarian among the Jews of Spain, immigrating to Córdoba from Fez during the second half of the tenth century. He established the parameters for the formal grammatical study of the Hebrew Bible that would shape the work of Sephardic exegetes in the following centuries.63 Hayyuj’s work was not comprehensive but rather focused on rare or grammatically problematic words. His exegesis avoided philosophical or theological arguments, focusing instead on clarifying the plain, contextual meaning of the text. The immediate and enthusiastic reception of his work among Jewish scholars of al-­Andalus gives us a sense of their interests. That said, the thrust of these works, at least with regard to Hebrew grammar and its application to biblical exegesis, was at turns both innovative and quite conservative. It

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was innovative in the sense that it departed from the interpretive postures of other scholars, including the great Baghdadi polymath Saadia Gaon (882– 942), who was more openly polemical. But it was also conservative in its insistence on adhering to the plain meaning of the text, and its reluctance to employ more elaborate interpretive strategies. Perhaps because of this dual character, these new grammatical works encountered both enthusiastic acceptance and resistance among the Jewish intelligentsia. Jonah ibn Janah expanded on the foundations established by Hayyuj, noting that he had already begun to run into opposition from Jewish scholars who saw his grammatical works as potentially undercutting traditional Jewish legal practice. In defense, Ibn Janah attacked those who deprecated the study of grammar, calling them arrogant Talmudists—congratulating themselves even though they had poorly understood what little Talmud they had studied. He argued that he was only adding to the work of the early rabbis, not contradicting them. He noted that the sages of the Talmud had admonished Jews not to abandon the plain meaning of the text, and furthermore that such plain meaning (peshat) could be independent from, and thus not be in danger of contradicting, Jewish law. However, Ibn Janah’s arguments were not enough to silence his opponents for good. More than a century later, the Sephardic biblical commentator Abraham ibn Ezra would still be invoking the same arguments against his own detractors. Indeed, as the twelfth century wore on, internecine squabbles among grammarians and exegetes overtook the sense of a shared Sephardic legacy and mission. The last of the great Jewish scholars of Muslim Spain still laid claim to the cultural heritage of Sepharad, but openly noted that the apogee of that culture had passed. Looking back at his native Spain during his travels abroad, Judah Alharizi offered an elegy in rhymed prose on the golden age of Sephardic literati: Alas, the aftermath of that great age was wrath and derision; Song’s well ran dry, our bands found no godly vision. Years passed as many sought Song’s lost daughter, but hewed broken cisterns and drew up bitter water. For with kingly Solomon gone to his reward and Abraham his prince, and Judah, wielder of Song’s sword, and Moses his prophet—lo, the angel of the Lord retired and prophetic Song expired; the splendor and the glory banished, that bright fountain vanished. None rose again to wield godly pen. We here today are beggars in ravaged fields, gleaners among shrunken yields, trailing their footsteps

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ever but gaining on them never—a ragged horde brandishing Folly’s sword. They ate the choicest wheat by half, leaving us chaff.64 Thus although Alharizi and his generation continued to write splendid literature in both Hebrew and Arabic, they did so in the shadows of the earlier scholars whose gifts, they felt, they could never match: men such as Solomon ibn Gabirol, Abraham ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, and Moses ibn Ezra. Many of his generation wrote earnest laments about the decline of Andalusi-­Jewish culture, but Alharizi took these feelings of cultural loss a step further, playing with the notion that Sepharad was in fact the new Zion. Judah Alharizi took Judah Halevi’s poetic words about Jerusalem, “the life of souls is the air of thy land,” and reframed them so that it was Sepharad “whose air is the life of souls.” For Alharizi it was Sepharad, and perhaps his native Toledo, that had become Zion: “there have the tribes gone up, the tribes of the Lord.”65 One aspect of Sephardic intellectual culture that remained consistent throughout its rise and decline in al-­Andalus is the importance invested in the various fields of religious inquiry, and the way in which science, grammar, piety, and personal honor blended together to form the vaunted and highly contentious world of the Jewish ‘adib. A brief yet emblematic story from this period offers a succinct illustration of this world. It mentions two Jewish physicians from al-­Andalus who were brought to Marrakesh to serve at the court of the Almoravid ruler, Ali ibn Yusuf. When one of the physicians, Abu l’Hasan Meir ibn Qamniel from Saragossa, found out the other had offered a literal interpretation of the Song of Songs for the emir, he quickly reproached his colleague, then offered the Ibn Yusuf an allegorical interpretation instead. Apocryphal though this anecdote might be, it nonetheless encapsulates something about Andalusi Jewish intellectual life. We see Jews working as physicians for Muslim lords and engaging in religious debate played out in harsh disagreements over modes of scriptural interpretation. 66

Judaism in al-­Andalus Sometime in the mid-­to late ninth century, an Andalusi Jew by the name Isaac ben Simeon wrote to the Geonim of Baghdad and asked them to compose “an order of prayers and benedictions for the entire year.” The result, the siddur of Rav Amram Gaon, was the first known prayer book of its kind in Jewish history. Prayer was always a major locus of personal and collective

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religious expression, much of which, from liturgical prayers (piyyutim) to reading Torah, was intended to be chanted or sung. Psalms were put to music and chanted in synagogues, as were original compositions. The strophic poetry that had become prevalent throughout Muslim and Jewish society in al-­Andalus became an irresistible form of religious expression, and the aesthetic sensibilities that many Jews developed in the world outside the synagogue came to influence the forms of Jewish worship. The practice of setting Hebrew liturgical poems to Arabic melodies popular throughout the Islamic world had become well established in the synagogues of al-­Andalus by the mid-­eleventh century. In some instances Hebrew was eschewed altogether. Arabic was so common as a language of poetic composition for Jews that prayers in Arabic were sung in some synagogues, a practice that met with displeasure from some rabbis. Poets and religious leaders debated the merits of blurring the line between secular and religious space, with some suggesting that the aesthetic delight of music needed to be justified by an underlying moral or ethical goal. Nonetheless, it is clear that the two spaces were inextricably intertwined, as were the patrons, practitioners, and audiences.67 Singing newly composed piyyutim in the synagogue, though common, was also a matter of some controversy. Indeed, the synagogue service was in the process of evolving for much of the period of Jewish life in al-­Andalus, only achieving a measure of standardization in the tenth century, with the general acceptance of an order of fixed prayers set by the Geonim of Baghdad. However, we know relatively little about this process of standardization. We do know that several leading Jewish authorities looked upon the practice of adding new liturgical songs to the synagogue service as problematic. Such additions disrupted the flow of the service and, so they argued, distracted the worshippers. The ongoing popularity of such practices suggests that many congregants did not share the misgivings of these critics. Ultimately, as with so many areas of religious practice, the scholars bent to the overwhelming will of the people. Joseph ibn Migash noted that he and his teacher, Isaac Alfasi, allowed cantors to prolong certain prayers with song “since this is a custom that has spread through all the world.”68 Singing gave Jewish congregants who may have been otherwise deficient in their religious education a chance to engage in the synagogue service, an opportunity they seem to have taken to with gusto. Judah Alharizi, who traveled widely throughout the Mediterranean world, noted that one of the reasons singing was so popular with Jewish congregants was that none understood Hebrew, and the melodies at least gave them a way to enjoy and

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connect with the prayer service.69 Although Alharizi was known for his sarcastic observations regarding the linguistic and intellectual abilities of his fellow Jews, his assessment here does not seem to be far off. Already by the eleventh century we have complaints that the average Jewish congregant was not sufficiently familiar with Hebrew to fully participate in the synagogue service. Judah ben Barzillay of Barcelona wrote: “In this generation, the cantor reads [the biblical portion from the scroll] and the congregant called to the Torah (‘oleh) remains silent,” or is coached by the cantor as to how to pronounce the traditional blessings.70 While Judah, as a leading scholar, might well have disapproved of this state of Hebrew knowledge, his observation indicates that the average Jewish congregant did not. They were sufficiently interested in fulfilling their religious obligations to attend prayer services and to accept the privilege of being called to the Torah. They were not, it would seem, chagrined at their inability to recite the required blessings associated with this honor. The lack of Hebrew or biblical knowledge did not seem to bring shame upon some Jews, who still wished the prestige—and perhaps the religious efficacy—of being an ‘oleh. For others, prayer offered the quintessential outlet for spiritual expression and creativity. Andalusi piyyutim began to include themes such as the benefits of philosophical contemplation, especially the refinement of the individual’s soul, and in particular the rational faculty or intellect. Writers such as Solomon ibn Gabirol linked repentance (even immortality of the soul) to the individual’s ability to develop his rational intellect. Appealing to a longstanding trope, Ibn Gabirol wrote of man’s inherent desire to praise God as well as his fundamental inadequacy for the task. At other times Ibn Gabirol’s frustration at the human inability to approach God properly is resolved by considering the nature of the human soul itself. Conceived by the philosopher-­poet as a divine essence trapped in human form, the soul could escape its corporeal bonds precisely through prayer. For Ibn Gabirol, then, the words of prayer were not human attempts to describe the ineffable. They were instead formulations of the holy Name by which God’s own essence erupted out of the human body in search of their divine source.71 One of the chief innovations in Jewish worship during this era was a turn toward the relationship between the individual and God, where it had traditionally focused on the collective. An example is the rise in popularity of the penitential prayers known as selihot (sing.: selihah). Many selihot were directed at the individual rather than at God. They urged contrition, the abandonment of concern with worldly pursuits, and a rededication to a

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life of piety. They were often recited—interspersed with selections from the Torah and psalms and a confession of sins—at special predawn vigils known as ashmurot. These additional prayer sessions allowed for the inclusion of original piyyutim and were particularly popular during the penitential days between the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) and the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). In other communities the recitation of additional prayers became an acceptable means of passing the time before morning prayers. Judah ben Barzillay complains about Jews being late to morning prayers, contrasting their behavior with the “admirable custom followed in some towns and villages” of those who get to morning prayers early to sing certain songs and preliminary psalms until it comes time to begin the prayer service.72 Being far from the traditional centers of rabbinic authority in Baghdad and, perhaps more important, from Jerusalem, meant being distant from what might be considered an authentic Jewish-­centered life. The Jews of Muslim Spain were at the “edge of the West” not only geographically but also religiously. Halevi’s famous poem gave voice to those in his society who felt alienated from their ancestral homeland, from the natural progress of history, from the proper service to God required of all Jews, and thus from their truest selves. Spiritually, the central question of Jewish life in al-­Andalus was not the status of Jews within Muslim society nor the vicissitudes of social and economic life, but the more profound problem of living a religious life while in diaspora. Important conditions on which ancient Judaism had been based were no longer operative; the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, impeding the proper service of God as instructed in the Torah. Over the centuries rabbinic Judaism had developed explanatory systems, rituals, and communal customs to deal with this fundamental problem. Yet for some there remained a sense of deep, existential estrangement. This spiritual unease should not be underestimated. It permeated the literature and thought of many of the era’s most prolific writers and found its way into prayers that reached an even wider Jewish audience. Halevi’s “My Heart Is in the East” is perhaps the most famous poem about the ambivalence of Jewish life in Spain, the pain of exile, and the longing for a return to a distant homeland and a more pious way of life, but it is not unique. For Halevi exile from the actual and figurative Jerusalem made it impossible to enjoy “all the pleasures of Spain.” More than a hundred years before Halevi, Dunash ibn Labrat offered a similar lament. In a poem that begins by glorifying the hedonistic pleasures of wine parties, lush gardens, and other earthly delights associated with the lives of the Andalusi elite, Ibn Labrat exclaims:

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“How can we be carefree or raise our cups in glee, when by all men are we rejected and despised?”73 Here the poet highlights the collective nature of the Jews’ fate, a bitter recognition of Jewish status that caps a list of lamentations about their exile from Jerusalem and the decline in Torah study. For these poets life in Spain always juxtaposed personal pleasure and earthly success with the requirements of collective religious duties and the general inability to fulfill them while being so far from Jerusalem. To be sure, such anxiety over religious inadequacy was not limited to the poets of Sepharad. Dismay regarding the sad state of Torah study and the related decline in Jewish values was a common trope in both poetic and general Jewish writing throughout the Middle Ages, enabling scholars to express their own piety and intellectual humility by emphasizing that Jews could and should be doing more to fulfill their religious obligations to God. And yet such laments may have been more than just rhetorical flourishes. Many of the leading voices of Sephardic society appeared to be genuinely appalled at the lack of religious education and organization in the communities in which they lived. By the ninth century it became a widespread practice in Spain to have the cantor recite the morning blessings in the synagogue on behalf of the community, who would then simply answer “amen.” This was a departure from the traditional practice in which Jews would recite these prayers at home. The change in custom took place for the sake of the “unlettered” men of the community who were unable to read the blessings on their own.74 Similarly, in the early eleventh century, the Baghdadi Gaon Hai expressed astonishment that many communities in Spain had ceased to recite the traditional Aramaic translation of the Bible (Targum) in their Torah reading services, although it was considered customary throughout the diaspora. In defense of local Jewish custom, Samuel ibn Naghrilla countered that this was only true in a few of the northern (perhaps Christian) provinces, and that in the rest of al-­Andalus it was omitted from the synagogue service only because everyone recited (studied) it at home.75 While this might have been the case for a limited number of highly educated Jews, like Ibn Naghrilla himself, it is doubtful that this practice was truly widespread. Such departures from religious tradition suggest that Jewish liturgical practices were evolving and dynamic. They also indicate that, as with many areas of daily life, rabbinic expectations often did not align with communal interests and individual ability, and local religious leadership by necessity adapted to popular tastes.76 It is little wonder, then, that competent prayer leaders were also in high demand in al-­Andalus, and that Jewish communities often sought to acquire

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talented cantors from other cities. A responsum of Isaac Alfasi makes reference to a Jewish preacher from France who visited Muslim Spain. He so impressed one local Jewish community that its leaders asked him to stay, and to send for his family, so that he could be their permanent teacher. Since the preacher is not named, nor does Alfasi seem to know him, it is unlikely that he was a scholar of great renown. The community in question was evidently without enough teachers and was willing to pay to have this man relocate his entire family, in addition to affording him a salary to teach for a three-­year period. As it happens, the crux of the legal question itself was about an adult student who eventually found the lessons too hard and only wanted to learn a smattering of Mishnah and Talmud rather than “the depth of the halakhah” (Jewish law). Such anecdotes remind us that not all Jews were great scholars, and that even those who sought to give study a try often found the undertaking too difficult.77 At times the gap between the high culture of the elites and the religious culture of the rest of the Jewish population was considerable. Here, as elsewhere in the premodern Jewish world, Andalusi Jewish scholars sought to uphold the sanctity of Judaism’s sacred texts and the demands of religious observance as expressed in the long tradition of Jewish law and custom. Yet this often proved to be an uphill battle. Not all rabbinic judges were well versed in Jewish law, nor did every judge have the respect of the community. An early letter from Baghdad to an unspecified community in Spain illustrates the practice of interrupting prayers as a means of communal governance. That is, litigants would disrupt Sabbath prayers in order to force the congregation community formally to hear their grievances. The Geonic response to the Andalusi practice was one of surprise that they did not have a judge to take charge of such situations, and that they allowed such matters to be taken up by community in general: “In every town in which there is an appointed judge to determine rights and liabilities, the plaintiff should turn to him alone, and not the community.”78 Unfortunately, it would seem that many Spanish communities were unwilling or unable to comply with this legal ideal. The reality is illustrated by a question regarding the authority of Jewish judges that was sent to Joseph ibn Migash, then the leading rabbinic authority in Iberia. [Regarding] one who does not understand the basic law, and does not know from which part of the Talmud it is derived, is he permitted to provide rulings, or should he perhaps be considered unreliable with

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regard to all matters? This latter option is especially pertinent if he is not a God-­fearing individual, and there is testimony that he has performed many wicked acts. In addition, people have testified about him that on one day he will claim that the law in a particular case is in accordance with the ruling of a certain Gaon, and then the next day he will resolve a similar case in a different manner and attribute his ruling to another Gaon. Please may our master provide for us a satisfactory clarification of the letter of the law in this regard.79 The concern here is with a judge who is not as educated as the authors of this inquiry. The latter are aghast at the situation, and perhaps somewhat jealous that such a man should wield authority over them. It would seem that Ibn Migash shared their disgust for the sad state of affairs in the Jewish community, but not their zeal to remove this particular judge. He replies: “You should know that this man is more qualified to issue rulings than a lot of people who have established themselves as authorities in this day and age, many of whom do not possess even one of these two attributes, that is, an understanding of the halakhah and the ability to attribute it to the opinion of the Geonim, of blessed memory. It is those who imagine that they can issue rulings through their analysis of the halakhah, and based on the extent of their Talmudic studies, who should be prevented from doing so.”80 From the point of view of Jewish self-­government, we also see a community struggling to contend with the exigencies of Jewish religious practice despite a lack of qualified scholars. Whatever their religious and intellectual ideals, Jews were also governed by pragmatic concerns. Not everyone studied Talmud, even among the leaders of the kehillot. Indeed, the study of Talmud for its own sake, rather than as a reference for applied law, appears to be the activity of a very specialized group. And if we accept the opinion of Ibn Migash, not all those who did study Talmud were able to truly understand it. Other leading scholars of the day echoed this rather disdainful view of Jewish religious and legal knowledge. In a mocking poem, Samuel ibn Naghrilla makes the point that Talmudic study, far from being a duty incumbent upon all Jewish men, was a practice best left to the select few with the intellectual capacity for such difficult work. They think that by grace of fringes and beard And turban they are men qualified to head an academy. Do you remember, my brother, when we both went

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To the synagogue on Hoshana Rabba. And we heard an ass braying and the shrieks Of oxen and they were all howling close by And I said “Who is it that has turned the house of God Into a stable—it is indeed a sin and a crime!” And they replied: “There are no asses or cattle in the house of the Lord These are men engaged in the study of a tractate of the Talmud!” . . . With their mouths they insulted Hillel and Shammai And slapped the face of Rabbi ‘Aqiva The teacher elaborated on the text to the benefit of the students And with difficulty seized a response from them As I sat there I was enraged by What I saw and my spirit was depressed81 Like most of the poetry of the era, Ibn Naghrilla’s withering assessment of Jewish education is layered with allusions and wordplay, but the essence of the key elements of his critique are clear. Here Judaism is not threatened by the seductive pull of material pleasures but by the boorishness of the rabbis and their students. Pious enthusiasm is no substitute for true ability and refinement. For Ibn Naghrilla the major problems facing the maintenance of Jewish piety and religious observance were the lack of decorum of the rabbinic academies and the general incompetence of teachers and students alike. For others it was the overly pragmatic use of Jewish sacred texts. The tendency of some scholars to focus on the legalistic aspect of the Torah and Talmud rather than on deeper theological questions also drew criticism. Maimonides, an exile from al-­Andalus who eventually became the most influential exponent of its religious traditions, was openly critical of legal scholars who ignored theology and philosophy.82 Such concerns notwithstanding, dedication to the study and application of religious law represented one of the most significant aspects of Andalusi Judaism. In the rabbinic academies of Muslim (and, later, Christian) Spain, the Talmud developed more fully into a sacred text in its own right. The Geonim of Baghdad had argued for the sacred nature of the Mishnah, the core text of the Talmud, but not necessarily for the extended rabbinic commentaries known as the Gemara. Beginning with Ibn Naghrilla in the early eleventh century, to the succeeding generation of Sephardic legal experts

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Isaac Alfasi, Ibn Migash, and Judah ben Barzillay, and on to Ibn Daud and Meir Abulafia in Christian Toledo in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the treatment of the Talmud as a sacred text from which Jews were meant to derive law to govern their daily lives became a centerpiece of Jewish religious life in Muslim and Christian Spain. Perhaps the key link in this chain was Isaac Alfasi, who emigrated from North Africa in the 1080s as an elderly and established scholar. Alfasi was in many ways the bridge between the sages of Qayrawan and Lucena. He arrived in the wake of the collapse of the rabbinic centers of Córdoba and Granada, when there was no native Jewish scholar in all of al-­Andalus who was a natural successor to Ibn Naghrilla in the field of legal studies. It was the contribution of a more advanced study of rabbinic texts that he brought with him from Qayrawan that truly made Lucena, and by extension Sephardic Jewry in general, the premier center for rabbinic study in the western Mediterranean.83 The use of the Talmud as a source for the derivation of applied law became a hallmark of Sephardic scholarship. Indeed, as early as the ninth century, Spanish Jews displayed a keen interest in halakhic codes, such as Halakhot ha-­ Gedolot, an expansion of a legal handbook originally developed by the Baghdadi Geonim. Other examples of this trend appeared steadily in succeeding generations and included the work Hilkheta Gavrata (Major Jewish Laws), by Samuel ibn Naghrilla, and Sefer ha-­Halakhot (The Book of Jewish Laws), by Isaac Alfasi. In the mid-­eleventh century, a Granadan judge named David ben Saadia al-­Ger produced Kitab al-­hawi (The Comprehensive Book), a massive legal compendium written in Arabic that was intended as a reference manual for Jewish judges. To this list we might also add the Sefer ha-­Ittim (Book of the Seasons), by Judah ben Barzillay of Barcelona. While Barzillay lived in Christian Iberia, he appears to be part of a larger Hispano-­Jewish intellectual milieu. Indeed the same Geonim who sent religious instruction to the sages of Lucena in the ninth and tenth centuries did the same for those in Christian Barcelona. Finally, Maimonides’ landmark legal code, the Mishneh Torah (Repetition of the Torah), marks a culmination and expansion of Andalusi halakhic scholarship, although it was ultimately produced in Egypt.84 Still, the use of Talmud for the development of applied law had its critics. What might appear to present-­day observers to be a steady development of Sephardic halakhic scholarship was, in fact, an exceedingly precarious chain that was very nearly severed at several different points of time. Abraham ibn Ezra, one of the most influential of all Sephardic exegetes, did not value Talmudic study as an end in and of itself, but rather as a tool to help people fulfill

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God’s commandments. He was particularly critical of scholars who occupied themselves with the study of Talmudic passages that had no practical application. Jonah ibn Janah went even further in his critique of Talmudists, attacking those who deprecated the study of grammar.85 The mention of the varying approaches to Talmudic learning brings up the topic of sectarian Judaism during this period, particularly the movement known as Karaism. Karaites were Jewish sectarians with roots in Persia and Babylonia who established communities in several regions, including the Land of Israel, during the ninth and tenth centuries. They are distinguished most notably by their rejection of the authority of rabbinic literature, which drove a wedge between them and mainstream “Rabbanite” Jews. We have little information about the nature of Karaite Judaism in al-­Andalus, or of the size and number of any distinct Karaite communities that might have existed there. However, the number of anti-­Karaite polemical references in the writing of Andalusi-­Jewish intellectuals and the fervor with which they are denounced must give us pause. At the very least Rabbanite authors were fully aware of Karaite theological arguments and took great pains to argue against these “heretical” views. Many of the best-­known Jewish works produced during the twelfth century display a nearly obsessive concern with Karaism. Ibn Daud’s Book of Tradition and Judah Halevi’s Book of the Kuzari, both of which read as extended defenses of rabbinic Judaism, present Karaism as a bigger existential threat than either Christianity or Islam. As early as the tenth century, charges of Karaism formed part of the intellectual debates among Andalusi Jews. Dunash ibn Labrat put forth his famous complaint against his rival, Menahem ibn Saruq, as a defense of standard Jewish theology. Some of Menahem’s interpretive postures appear close to, and perhaps influenced by, those of Karaite scholars. Thus not only did Menahem seem to have departed from what his detractors saw as the correct interpretation of the bible, but that deviation was viewed as sharing characteristics with the Jewish heretical group par excellence. Still, demonizing one’s intellectual adversaries by calling them heretics is not proof that they were in fact heretics. No works from self-­professed Andalusi Karaites have survived, and most of the Karaite literature that Spanish Jews saw fit to condemn was from the eastern Mediterranean, not Iberia. Consequently the degree to which their attacks on Karaism are evidence of a serious religious challenge from within their native communities, or just an outsized response to a relatively small movement, is not clear. Similarly, we read of Jewish courtiers in neighboring Castile using their positions to gain

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royal support for the destruction and forced conversion of Karaite rivals. Yet while such references do much to burnish the credentials of these courtiers as defenders of “true” Judaism, their actions are difficult to corroborate. Thus if a form of Karaite Judaism did exist in the Iberian Peninsula, it left little trace beyond the virulent polemics of its enemies.86

The Sephardim: Jewish Intellectual Culture in al-­Andalus Perhaps the most enduring aspect of Jewish society in Muslim Spain was the self-­perception of the Sephardim as a unique community within the wider Jewish diaspora. Although, as we have seen, their society was highly localized and internally divided, it nonetheless gave rise to a sense of shared cultural identity, at least among the educated elites. As they developed an increasingly advanced religious and literary culture over the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries, Andalusi Jewish authors began to promote their cultural world as distinct, with leaders unrivaled in their mastery of the Hebrew language and, by extension, in their ability to interpret scripture. A short and somewhat innocuous passage in the biblical Book of Obadiah (1:20) makes reference to “the exile of Jerusalem who are in Sepharad.” Although the identification of “Spain” (“Hispamia” or “Aspamia” in Jewish texts) as the biblical “Sepharad” was widely accepted within the Jewish world by the early Middle Ages, it was not until the tenth century that the Jews of Spain began to see it as more than a general geographical marker. With the rapid development of Jewish intellectual circles in cities such as Córdoba, Lucena, and Granada, Jewish elites came to invoke Sepharad’s association with ancient Jerusalem as an emblem of cultural pride. In his letter to the Khazar king, Hasdai ibn Shaprut presents himself as “Hasdai, son of Isaac, belonging to the exiled Jews of Jerusalem in Sepharad.”87 Ibn Shaprut’s indirect reference to the ties between Andalusi Jews and Judean nobility was made more explicit by the chronicler Abraham ibn Daud, who noted that the Jews of Granada proudly held “that they are descended from the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the holy city, from the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, not from [the inhabitants of] the villages or of the unwalled towns.” But it was the Granada-­born poet Moses ibn Ezra who stated the superiority of Sephardic genealogy most plainly when he boasted: “There is no doubt at all that the inhabitants of Jerusalem, from whom we—members of the Sephardic Exile—are descended, were more knowledgeable in rhetorical eloquence and

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in rabbinic tradition than the residents of the other cities and towns.”88 Thus pride in being Spanish Jews or “Sephardim,” combined with a cultural ideal of literary and linguistic refinement, formed the basis for the Sephardic claim to cultural prominence. This newfound “Sephardic” identity was part of a wider debate over ethnic identity and political legitimacy that was taking place within Andalusi society. That debate involved various ethnic and religious groups, each of which promoted their own community while laying claim to prominence in the fields of rhetoric and literary style, called ‘adab in Arabic. Jewish elites, trying to bridge the worlds of Jewish and general Andalusi culture, employed the short passage from Obadiah to assert their dominance within Jewish society and to enhance their status within the religiously and ethnically pluralistic society of al-­Andalus. In a purely Jewish context, association with “exiles of Jerusalem” carried with it a claim to inherited nobility through their Judean ancestry. As the scions of the noble families and ancient priesthood of Jerusalem, the Jews of Sepharad could set themselves apart from, and above, all other Jewish groups within the diaspora. Emphasizing their genealogical connection to ancient Jewish aristocracy also carried with it an implicit claim to religious leadership, an honor that was previously limited to the scholars and leading families of Baghdad and Jerusalem.89 In the tenth century, as Hasdai ibn Shaprut and his rabbinic protégés sought to create religious institutions that could claim independence from those in Baghdad, styling themselves “the exile of Jerusalem who are in Sepharad” bolstered their growing religious legitimacy within the Jewish world. Finally, as descendants of a noble and ancient diaspora, Sephardic Jews situated themselves within Iberian history in a way that even the Arab elites could not. While the latter could boast lineages that tied them to the tribes of Arabia and the family of the Prophet, Jews could assert a connection to Iberia that predated the arrival of the Arabs and Berbers, and even the Gothic Christians. As “Sephardim,” they were the exile spoken of in the Bible, not recent immigrants from North Africa and the Levant. These questions of honor, legitimacy, and ancestry were of the utmost importance in the medieval Islamic world. Lineage had been a major focus of Arab elites since before the advent of Islam; genealogy was a means of buttressing social dominance. In al-­Andalus, where ethnic Arabs were outnumbered by Berbers and converted Christians, the science of genealogy (‘ilm al-­nasab) was used to limit political and religious authority to those who could claim descent from the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad (the

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Quraysh) or from other tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. Other Muslim groups responded to this challenge in various ways. Some contested Arab claims to ethnic and linguistic superiority (‘arabiyya) by asserting the honor of their own ethnic heritage and demanding social equality. Abu ‘Amir ibn Gharsiyah, a Muslim of Slavic ancestry, wrote a treatise championing the virtues of his ethnic heritage. A contemporary work entitled Clear and Victorious Arguments Against Those Who Deny the Excellencies of the Sclavonians echoed his sentiments. But a much more popular response to the concept of ‘arabiyya was simply to “become” Arab, sometimes through the fabrication of genealogies demonstrating family links to ancient Arabia.90 Andalusi Jews had their own responses to ‘arabiyya. In addition to emphasizing their aristocratic lineage within the Jewish world, Jewish intellectuals also began to promote the purity and antiquity of Hebrew. Jewish writers countered Muslim denigration of Judaism and Arab promotion of the inimitability of Qur’anic Arabic by turning to biblical Hebrew as a model for new literary composition. Those with an interest in participating in Andalusi high culture, or in obtaining lucrative and prestigious government jobs, continued to master the Arabic language and literature, which remained the key to success in these realms. But beginning in the tenth century, Jewish scholars in Iberia also began to foster the linguistic study of Hebrew and Hebrew literary creativity in unprecedented ways. For these Jewish intellectuals, the ideal was a combination of religious piety and literary skill. Moses ibn Ezra, for example, praised his fellow poet Joseph ibn Sahl as a man of “great intelligence, brilliant poetry, wisdom in Jewish law and clear, concise language,” as well as for having a noble lineage.91 Samuel ibn Naghrilla was an even more prominent example of this ideal. In addition to being the wealthiest and most powerful Jewish courtier of his age, Ibn Naghrilla was also a leading expert in Jewish law and one of the greatest medieval Hebrew poets. Some even argued that Sephardic elites like Ibn Naghrilla were naturally predisposed to greatness. For Moses ibn Ezra, for example, poets were born, not made. While he recognized that inspiration and hard work were integral to the development of poetic skill, there was no substitute for being born with a natural gift. “You should know also that the poem will not fill the eyes and ears and will not satisfy the heart and mind unless it flows naturally from the creator and from the innate ability of its maker.”92 For Ibn Ezra and likeminded elites, the dominance of Sephardic culture was similarly clear and inevitable. It was Sepharad that had become the natural home of Jewish poetry, grammar, and biblical exegesis—intellectual activities that were

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inextricably linked. Excellence in these fields was a result of the direct genealogical links with ancient Judea. Ibn Ezra’s claims became a feature of Sephardic pride, as generations of Hispano-­Jewish poets saw themselves as the heirs to biblical Hebrew, and even, sometimes, to a kind of prophetic inspiration. In his thirteenth-­century Hebrew rhymed prose collection, The Book of Tahkemoni, Judah Alharizi has his protagonist declare: When Poesy’s sages were bound in chain, Song’s silver spring burst forth from Spain. When visions of God were denied in the East Song’s prophets arose on the Western plain.93 Such cultural boasts were built on popular notions. Family lineage and the honor brought to one’s family through wealth, power, and the recognition of one’s intellectual gifts elevated the ‘adib above the rest of Jewish society. Ibn Naghrilla was more interested in grooming his son for the post of courtier than in educating the Jewish masses. He sent him a poem from the battlefield, together with a book of Arabic poetry to learn by heart. The poem starts: “Yosef, accept this book that I have chosen for you from the best of the language of the Arabs.”94 He emphasized to his children the importance of copying his poems, a tactic that would be echoed by later generations, as a way of training future Jewish courtiers and communal leaders. Not all writers came from rich and prominent families. Intellectuals who lacked the political clout of their patrons looked beyond family lineage to promote an imagined class of men who stood for all that was good and honorable among the Sephardim. When the eleventh-­century poet and philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol extolled the virtues of his temporary patron, Samuel ibn Naghrilla, he did so as an expression of Sephardic cultural dominance: His Responsa are read throughout Babylonia And expounded by communal authorities. In the council of the heads of Nehardea and Sura, The great cities of jurisprudence They say: “The Sephardim have discovered The wonders of concealed knowledge: They have seen the truth prevail in their Master While we see delusions.”

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Here Ibn Gabirol stakes a claim for Sephardic prowess in advancing Jewish intellectual culture, an accomplishment that even their cultural rivals in Baghdad are forced to recognize.95 Such boasts of the superiority of Sephardic culture were not meant to include all Andalusi Jewry. In later centuries Jews with cultural ties to Iberia would proudly claim what they understood to be a glorious Sephardic heritage. But in its formative years, Sephardic culture was less universally embraced. The shared intellectual culture of the Sephardic elites bound them together, simultaneously marginalizing other sectors within Jewish society who were not as literate and did not participate quite as fully in it. Poets could strengthen the social bonds between them and their patrons, one of the many relationships linking various sectors of the Jewish community. They could also take part in more competitive social activities, where various intellectual, political, and economic luminaries vied with one another for honor, rank, and fame.96 Much like their Muslim counterparts, Jewish elites identified with particular subgroups within Jewish society, with each group seeing itself as the true champion of Jewish culture and tradition. Jewish authors thus often assumed an embattled and polemical stance against an imagined mob of detractors. Some pursued Muslim patrons or declared common intellectual bonds with Muslim writers, even over those with other Jews.97 These rivalries, often based on elevating one’s own faction over and above all others, was a feature of Jewish intellectual culture in al-­Andalus, and, indeed, characterized Sephardic society throughout the Middle Ages. One of the most notorious of such rivalries was that between Andalusi-­ born scholar Menahem ibn Saruq and the North African émigré Dunash ibn Labrat. While their longstanding public dispute was ostensibly about the nature of Hebrew and Arabic grammatical and literary forms, it marked a larger social rift over the question of Jewish acculturation and religious identity.98 Menahem, a native of Tortosa, moved to Córdoba in the mid-­tenth century and became a scribe for the father of Hasdai ibn Shaprut, and eventually for Hasdai himself. But it was his own intellectual contributions that gained him fame, most notably his production of the first comprehensive Hebrew grammar and dictionary, generally referred to simply as the Mahberet (Notebook). Menahem quickly gained a group of enthusiastic disciples who considered Hebrew to be distinct from, and superior to, all other languages. This was not a unique position among medieval Jews, but Menahem and his disciples were also opposed to adapting Hebrew to Arabic

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grammatical forms. They encountered resistance. Dunash was a Maghrebi scholar who had studied in Baghdad under Saadia Gaon, returning to the West as an ardent defender of Geonic practices and religious authority. He, too, was drawn to the burgeoning Jewish community of Córdoba, arriving at the height of Menahem’s fame, and he immediately challenged the latter’s rejection of Arabic grammatical models. Instead, Dunash championed the Baghdadi intellectual curriculum set by Saadia and the other Geonim, and he disparaged Menahem’s ideas as those of a provincial upstart. The seemingly innocuous academic dispute that arose between Dunash and Menahem would have important social consequences. To establish himself as the arbiter of Hebrew linguistic and literary style, Dunash aggressively pursued and won Ibn Shaprut’s patronage, first by slandering his rival and then by having him beaten and imprisoned. Nor did the dispute end there. The disciples of each scholar formed competing factions, issuing defenses of their respective teacher’s positions and dedicating them to the great nasi in the hope of winning his endorsement. But even the support of Cór­doba’s most influential Jewish courtier could not guarantee the allegiance of all elements within the community. The faction formed by Menahem’s students and their families viewed Dunash as a foreign interloper in the Andalusi intellectual scene, just as they saw his introduction of Arabic grammatical forms as foreign to Judaism.99 The greatest of all Menahem’s disciples, Isaac ibn Gikatilla, came from the great rabbinic center of Lucena, and another of his chief defenders, Isaac ibn Capron, appears to have come from an old family from Córdoba. In an open letter to Dunash, they offered a nativist defense of the local, Sephardic, intellectual authority. The following illustrative passage from this letter makes clear that they have taken Dunash’s critique of the Mahberet as an affront to their “national” Sephardic honor: And do not think that what I have discussed thus far was meant as a defense of Menahem and his interpretation. Rather, it was a response to the foolishness planted in your heart, and the ignorance of your writings, and because you have made your heart conceited and opened your mouth, imagining that the sages and scholars of Sepharad are without judgment and devoid of wisdom, acting as if they did not exist, paying them no attention, and saying that “there are none among them who can understand my words and answer me,” and comparing them to the Philistines who saw that their champion was dead, and fled, thinking that in slaying Menahem the teachings

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of the rest of the scholars of Sepharad would be reduced to fragments, and they would run and hide. Thus, I have filled myself with words, for you have inflamed the spirit within me to nullify your thoughts so that you might recognize that there are in Sepharad those who have attained wisdom, and men of erudition.100 The North African contingent responded to this defiant assertion of Sephardic prowess by maintaining that local pride was little more than base provincialism. In a defense of his master’s position, Dunash’s student, Judah ibn Sheshet, countered by depicting his Iberian rivals as crude heathens, unworthy of participation in serious scholarly debate.101 In the end the native Sephardic faction would prevail, but not before many of the core ideas introduced by the “foreigner,” Dunash, had become integral parts of the Sephardic curriculum. The disparate grammatical and stylistic approaches would form a synthesis. By the twelfth century most elites within both the Jewish and Muslim communities adhered to a form of Andalusi “nationalism” that zealously championed their distinct philosophical worldview and literary heritage. Conversely, although many among the Andalusi Jewish elite retained much of their ethnocentric pride, they nonetheless abandoned much of the intellectual legacy of Menahem and his school. While they made extensive use of Menahem’s Mahberet, the great Andalusi Jewish philologists of the eleventh century make no mention of its author. The Menahem-­Dunash controversy was therefore as much a manifestation of a local power struggle between Jewish cliques as it was a cultural competition between the Hebrew and Arabic languages. As with Ibn Daud’s account of the “Sephardization” of Moses ben Hanokh and his dynasty, the cultural aspect of the dispute was ultimately resolved by the integration of the foreign intellectual elements into the Andalusi curriculum, without altering that society’s sense of uniqueness and superiority.102 That cultural bravado would be one of the most enduring elements of Andalusi Jewish society, becoming a hallmark of Sephardic identity long after the Middle Ages.

* * * The portrait that emerges from this period is of a society in which religious observance and piety were important to communal leaders and the general populace alike, even if the two had differing opinions on how such devotion

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should be expressed. This tension between shared and contested religious identities stands as a symbol of Andalusi Jewish society as a whole, and serves as a caution to the historian. The social reality of Jewish life in Muslim Spain resists easy generalizations. From the ninth to the eleventh century, Jewish intellectuals fostered an identity as Sephardim that combined nobility of lineage and general cultural prowess. Yet their group identity did not embrace the whole of Andalusi Jewry, which remained a highly decentralized and internally divided society throughout this period. Each local Jewish community was home to various and often competing factions, both social and intellectual. These dichotomies also extended to the Jews’ status within a majority Muslim society. Princely protection of Jews and the general social integration they enjoyed did not preclude anti-­Jewish sentiment. Indeed, such hostility was ever present as a latent, and at times overt, feature of Muslim-­Jewish relations. Similarly, Jewish wealth and unparalleled social mobility existed alongside systemic poverty and the relegation of many Jews to humble and even humiliating trades. To the extent that we can identify a high degree of Jewish economic success during this period, we must remember that such prosperity was not evenly distributed throughout the Jewish community. The Jewish experience of the “golden age” varied significantly. For every poet and silk merchant there were many more who plied humble trades and seemingly left no mark on the religious or cultural landscape of medieval Judaism. Taken together, these tanners, dyers, shopkeepers, and vintners, not to mention nearly all women, represent the majority of Andalusi Jewry. In Jewish politics as well, we should view the likes of Ibn Shaprut and Ibn Naghrilla as truly exceptional, not characteristic. Sephardic society in its formative centuries was characterized by relatively independent communities of modest size in which a limited group of wealthy elites contrasted with a majority of artisans, farmers, petty merchants, and the poor. By establishing this nuanced and textured portrait of Andalusi Jewry in the tenth and eleventh centuries, we are better positioned to evaluate the development of Hispano-­Jewish society through the later Middle Ages.

CHAPTER 2

Spanish Jewry in Transition

In the autumn of 1140, an aging Judah Halevi arrived in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria. The great poet, physician, and philosopher had turned pilgrim, leaving behind the pleasures of Spain and setting out for the Land of Israel, hoping finally to glimpse the ruins of the ancient Temple. Halevi’s decision to abandon life in Muslim Spain stands as a powerful symbol of the end of an era. Within a decade of his departure, the vast majority of his fellow Andalusi Jews had followed him into exile from the fabled cities of al-­Andalus, not as pilgrims but as refugees fleeing widespread and unprecedented religious persecution. The end of the golden age was swift and harsh—within two generations, the poetic declarations of the unrivaled cultural prominence of al-­ Andalus began to give way to mournful lamentations of its destruction. But the downfall of Jewish society in Muslim Iberia did not signal the end of the unique Sephardic culture that had developed there. Rather, it instigated a period of transition for Andalusi Jews who held fast to their cultural legacy as they established outposts in new lands. Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides, followed one trajectory of exile that led to the Maghreb and, eventually, to Egypt. There, while in the service of the Fatimid rulers at Fustat, Maimonides became a beacon of the Andalusi-­Sephardic intellectual tradition, synthesizing, expanding, and transmitting it to communities throughout the Jewish world. But most of the Andalusian exodus took a different path, fleeing northward into the territories of Christian Iberia and southern France. As Jews in Muslim Iberia became uprooted, they did not disappear but rather entered into a prolonged period of transition and transformation. The cultural legacy of Andalusi Jewry would live on in the new colonies established by the refugees as their leading scholars undertook a program of translating the vast corpus of Judeo-­Arabic learning into Hebrew. Throughout the upheaval of the twelfth century and well into the thirteenth, this

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movement of translation and cultural transmission kept a far-­flung Andalusi diaspora tethered to Spain through a web of intellectual networks. It also brought these Jews into direct contact with the preexisting Jewish societies of Christian Iberia and Provence. Politically and socially, these local Jews would play an integral role in the settlement of the newcomers and their integration into a rapidly expanding Christian society. Culturally, the ensuing encounter between the Latinized and Arabized Jews would transform the very nature and evolution of medieval Judaism.

Andalusi Jewry in Decline The transition of Iberian Jewry from Muslim to Christian lands was intricately bound up with the intensification of the military conflicts between Muslim and Christian lords known in western historiography as the Reconquista. By the mid-­eleventh century, the tide had slowly begun to turn against the various taifa states in al-­Andalus, whose leaders remained divided and overmatched by the increasingly emboldened Christian kings to the north. Muslim military defeats at Barbastro in 1064 by a combined Norman and Aragonese force, and at Toledo in 1085 by Alfonso VI of Castile, marked major turning points in peninsular history. For the first time in centuries, Muslim dominance in the region was in doubt. This shift in Iberian power dynamics prompted the taifa princes to turn to the Maghreb for help. A succession of powerful Berber armies answered the call, uniting the fractious city-­states of al-­Andalus under two new, energetic dynasties: the Almoravids and then the Almohads. These new rulers would make sweeping changes to Muslim culture in the region which would eventually lead to the complete collapse of Jewish life in Muslim Spain. At first the changes to Jewish status were in degree rather than in kind. As noted in the previous chapter, the expectations that Jews would be subjugated and in a position of social humility—if not outright humiliation—were woven into the religious doctrine of Islam vis-­à-­vis the dhimmi from its very beginning. And while such degradation of Jewish social status was neither universally nor consistently enforced, it nonetheless persisted as a ready-­made social and religious standard that could be invoked at any time. For most of their history, the Jews formed a stable and generally prosperous sector of Andalusi society. But that stability was generally a function of caliphal and princely self-­ interest and the ability of these rulers to maintain order. It is impossible to

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recover what average Muslims thought about the social standing of the Jews who lived among them. Did they think that Jewish wealth or poverty, accomplishments and tribulations were any more or less deserved than those of their Muslim neighbors? Were they filled with religious contempt when their rulers elevated Jews to positions of honor and authority, or did they see such decisions as entirely within the jurisdiction of kings and caliphs who could reward or punish their subjects at their pleasure? We simply do not know. What we can say is that Jewish (and Christian) subordination to the faithful was a longstanding and oft-­repeated ideal within their society, often deployed rhetorically as a means of criticizing Muslim political ineptitude and corruption. The twelfth-­century Muslim chronicler Ibn al-­Kardabus echoed the theme from Abu Ishaq of Elvira’s polemical qasida that the Jews’ wrongful ascent to power was to be blamed on a lack of Muslim vigilance. “The affairs of the Muslims were entrusted to the Jews, who caused in their ranks the ravages of lions, now converted into chamberlains, viziers, and secretaries. During that time, the Christians went about al-­Andalus every year, capturing, sacking, destroying, and taking prisoners.”1 This quote is principally a criticism of bad government, but one in which powerful Jews—and Jews in general—are collectively identified as symbols of a social order turned upside down. While Jewish viziers and other prominent figures may well have acted as the lightning rods for Muslim frustration, the Jewish community as a whole bore the brunt of the popular violence and harsh political policies that often followed. With the arrival of the Almoravids in al-­Andalus in the late eleventh century, such anti-­Jewish policies became an increasingly problematic factor in Jewish life.2 Relatively little is known about Jewish life under the Almoravids. The dynasty first came to power in North Africa, and after military forays into the Iberian Peninsula in the 1080s, its armies finally swept into the region in the 1090s and subdued most of the Andalusi taifa states. What scant information we do possess about the treatment of the dhimmi populations that came under their control points to a hardening of official policy with regard to their general status and social mobility. The Almoravid emir, Yusuf ibn Tashfin, is said to have strictly enforced the subordination of Jews in his North African domains, even before the Almoravids came to power in al-­Andalus. They then implemented similar policies in their Iberian territories, continuing an established strategy with regard to the ahl al-­dhimma. This policy simultaneously found enthusiastic support from local Andalusi jurists.3 Whether this changing treatment of the dhimmis resulted from the Almoravid emir’s attempt to curry favor with the influential class of jurists

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as a political maneuver or the jurists’ effort to exert their own authority over the new dynasty, the result for the Jews was increased social marginalization. This shift is illustrated by a legal manual (hisba) written by the jurist Ibn ‘Abdun that sought to regulate public behavior in Seville. On the question of dhimmi Ibn ‘Abdun was in some ways quite traditional, but also took some stringent positions. He linked the status of Christians and Jews to a larger critique of governing policies in which the average Muslim was being victimized by unjust lords. The government and its tax-­collectors were seen as greedy and corrupt, enemies of the pious and beleaguered Muslim masses.4 But the dhimmis were also singled out in new ways. Ibn ‘Abdun argued against Muslims patronizing Jewish and Christian physicians, noting that they “do not harbor good feelings” toward the faithful, and his manual went on to introduce several measures meant to mark and humiliate dhimmis in particular. They were forbidden to dress in the sorts of clothes worn by honorable people and were required to wear a symbol that designated them as dhimmis. These signs were part of a larger strategy to enforce a social hierarchy that clearly debased Jews and Christians. Ibn ‘Abdun writes: “Muslims should not give a massage to a Jew or a Christian. Nor should he collect his rubbish or clean his latrine because they [Jews and Christians] are better for these jobs as they are jobs for vile people.” Similarly, the hisba forbade Muslims to use the typical greeting “Peace rest upon you” with Jews or Christians.5 His support for the position, a reference to Qur’an 58:19, suggests that he considered Jews and Christians to be part of “Satan’s party,” emphasizing a longstanding, if not universal, legal trend. The anti-­Jewish measures that began at this time were part of two distinct yet related phenomena. First, the essential categorization of the Jews as ahl al-­dhimma made them vulnerable to rulers and jurists who wished to use the social mobility of the religious minorities as evidence for the need for regime change or social reform, as we saw in the previous chapter. The second trend was the fear that dhimmis, and at times, certain Muslim factions, were in league with the enemies of the Muslim state. For the most part this fear was directed toward the Christian minority in al-­Andalus. The assault by Aragonese forces under King Alfonso I in 1125 provoked fears that the local Christian communities under Almoravid rule might join them and revolt.6 While in this context the Jews were not the primary enemy, they were nonetheless suspect due to their association with Christians as fellow nonbelievers. Indeed, it was common for Muslim legal texts to treat the two religions as a single category.7

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As was often the case in such instances, the primary targets for such reformist measures were the most prominent Jews in the service of the Almoravid rulers. In one such case, the Jewish physician Abu ‘l-­Hasan Meir ibn Qamniel was censured for dressing as a Muslim, omitting the distinctive markings required of the dhimmis, and riding in a manner similarly reserved for the faithful.8 He eventually immigrated to Fez and served the Almoravids there, a fact that speaks less of a systematic anti-­dhimmi program under this dynasty than of a rising instability of Jewish life in varying parts of al-­Andalus.9 Nonetheless, the Jews keenly felt the general erosion of their status. As jurists in Seville argued for a harsher imposition of the standard limitations on dhimmi status and social mobility, rioting engulfed the local Jewish community in Córdoba.10 The survivors of these attacks relocated to other cities; some crossing the frontier into Christian Spain, others biding their time and waiting for a softening of official policies. As Almoravid power began to wane in the 1120s and 1130s, Andalusi Jews no doubt hoped a change in political regime would once again allow for the florescence of Jewish trade, social mobility, and religious and intellectual patronage that had characterized their society for more than two centuries. Indeed, nothing in their experience could have prepared them for what came next. By the mid-­twelfth century, the restriction of social privileges and sporadic violence against the Jews under the Almoravids gave way to full-­scale religious persecution under their rivals and successors, the Almohads. The Almohad dynasty originated in southwestern Morocco among the Masmuda Berbers of the High Atlas, with its first rulers rising to power behind a message of religious reform and renewal. The dynasty’s founder, Abu ‘Abd Allah ibn Tumart, portrayed himself as Islam’s long-­awaited redeemer, or Mahdi, and imbued early Almohad rule with a sense of divinely guided transformation. This utopian worldview rejected the status quo, in which a variety of Muslim legal and theological schools of thought could coexist, along with other monotheistic groups (the dhimmi) who accepted a certain level of subjugation in exchange for political protection. Instead the Almohads came to assert a singular and universal form of monotheism for all to follow. As a result the Almohad caliph ‘Abd al-­Mu’min effectively ended dhimmi status by declaring that all his subjects, including Jews, Christians, and other Muslims, convert to the new Almohad form of Islam. The forced conversion of Jews under the Almohads was therefore not an instance of anti-­Jewish persecution per se, but rather part of a larger cultural revolution.

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That being said, the impact of these unprecedented events on Jewish history should not be underestimated. First, the Almohad abolition of dhimmi status, while not aimed specifically at Jews, nonetheless had a disastrous impact on Jewish society in al-­Andalus. Whole communities were destroyed, and a massive refugee crisis ensued as those who could sought to flee the region, searching for safe haven elsewhere. Quite simply it brought about the collapse of Jewish society in Muslim Iberia, and the transfer of longstanding Jewish communities and intellectual centers to new regions. Second, the subsequent rejection of these forced converts by many Muslims served to reinforce and exacerbate tensions between Muslims and Jews throughout al-­Andalus and the Maghreb. The neo-­Muslims were forced to wear distinguishing marks on their garments, much as if they were still professing Jews. Assessing the aftermath of the Almohad conversions, the thirteen-­century Muslim chronicler Al-­Marrakushi declared: “No church or synagogue is to be found in the entire Maghreb. Jews exhibit their Islam externally, recite the prayers in Mosques, and have their children read the Qur’an, although God only knows what their hearts harbor and what occurs in in their houses.”11 Here the historian expresses what may have been a widely spread suspicion regarding the faithfulness of their new coreligionists. In a phenomenon that repeat itself on an even larger scale two centuries later, Jews who sought to escape death or expulsion via conversion found that the royal mandate was at odds with popular opinion. That is, even those Jews who embraced Islam met stiff resistance from other Muslims. As a result they were generally treated as pariahs, forced to wear distinctive marks on their clothing and to live separately from the rest of society.12 This failure of Almohad society to successfully integrate these new Muslims underscores the degree to which negative associations of the Jews could transcend legal declarations and theological arguments. These widespread expressions of hostility against the Jews and Judaism, while in many ways anomalous in medieval Muslim society, had far-­reaching results for the course of Jewish history. Some of those who converted no doubt remained Muslim, while others found ways to revert openly to Judaism. Some Jews were killed, while others, perhaps most, opted for exile from al-­Andalus. With regard to Jewish attitudes, contemporary Jewish sources are mostly silent on the Almohad persecutions, and it’s hard to know exactly why. It does seem that the shame of apostasy may have been a contributing factor here. While still a boy, Maimonides and his family lived for a time in the Almohad city of Fez before establishing themselves

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in the more tolerant haven of Fustat, Egypt. Whether Maimonides was forced to live outwardly as a Muslim during his sojourn in the Maghreb is unclear, but other Andalusi refugees appear to have done so. Joseph ben Judah ibn ‘Aqnin of Barcelona, who also lived in Fez, attempted to live outwardly as a Muslim. Comparing the reception given to Jewish apostates of an earlier period to the cruel fate that awaited Jewish converts of his own day, Ibn ‘Aqnin laments: “As for those who yielded to their demands, forsaking the community of Israel, [our enemies] would extol and honor them, as already related in the Talmud. However, in the present persecutions, on the contrary, the more we obey their instructions and comply with their doctrines and forsake our own, the more they burden and yoke and increase our travail.”13 As much as Ibn ‘Aqnin decried the Muslim abuse of Jewish converts, he also railed against those converts who accommodated perhaps too readily to life as a Muslim, including adopting Muslim marriage customs, and called for all converts to flee the lands of persecution so that they might practice Judaism openly in other lands.14 As we will see, such calls for resistance and dedication to Jewish practice were also common rabbinic responses to mass conversion in Christian Spain some three centuries later. Like his disciple, Ibn ‘Aqnin, Maimonides also wrote with some bitterness about the general subject of forced conversion, perhaps reflecting his own personal trials.15 And yet how individual Jews dealt with such government persecution appears to have been more complicated. As with all aspects of life, popular response to such pressures differed from the public, written pronouncements of their rabbis. Not all Jews had the ability to travel to and resettle in far-­off lands. It is possible that some of the Jews who chose conversion remained in al-­Andalus as outward Muslims and secret Jews. Those who were unable to escape to more tolerant parts of the Muslim world where they might revert to Judaism may well have persevered on the margins of normative Muslim society, either as crypto-­Jews or rejected Muslims. As the Almohad moment eventually passed sometime in the early thirteenth century, the majority of these converts appear to have disappeared into the ranks of Muslim society. We have little information about Jewish life in the Muslim kingdom of Granada, which followed the collapse of Almohad power, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. When the forces of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella entered the city of Granada at the triumphant conclusion of the renewed wars of conquest in January 1492, the city appears to have been home to a community of Jews. However, whether these were descendants of

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the remnants of the Andalusi Jewry that had succeeded in weathering the Almohad storm or more recent immigrants who had come up from North Africa or down from Castile is hard to say. But this last Muslim stronghold on the peninsula ceased to be home to intellectually or economically prestigious Jewish centers after the early thirteenth century. The twin factors of Almohad persecution and Christian expansion effectively ended the “golden age” of Jewish life in Muslim Spain. A contemporary Jewish writer recounted the harrowing events that befell the Jews in his native city of Sijilmasa—as told to him by Maghrebi Jews who had just witnessed and escaped them. He reports that ‘Abd al-­Mu’min overthrew the Almoravid rulers of the region with help from the local populace, and set about abolishing the protected status of the Jews: He captured Tlemcen and massacred all the [Jewish] inhabitants of the city, except those who embraced Islam. When word of these events reached the population of Sijilmasa, they rebelled against their governor, and, in demonstration of their opposition to the Almoravids, expelled them from the city. They then rallied to ‘Abd al-­Mu’min and delivered the city to him. When he made his entrance into the city, he gathered the Jews and proposed that they convert to Islam. After having held disputations with him for a period of seven months, during which they fasted and prayed, one of his commanders came and summoned them to abjure their faith, which they refused to do. Thereupon he slaughtered one hundred and fifty Jews who perished as martyrs. “The Rock is perfect in his action (Deut. 32.4).” Blessed is the true Judge, who judges with righteousness and truth. “The King’s word is sovereign (Eccl. 8.4).” The remaining reneged and the first to apostatize was Joseph the son of ‘Amran, the rabbinical judge of Sijilmasa! On account of this I will mourn and wail.16 Whether or not the course of events in al-­Andalus followed a similar pattern is hard to say. Whatever the case, a breakdown in the traditional relationship between Muslims and the ahl al-­dhimma appears to have taken place, causing a large number of Jews to take flight from the region. Abraham ibn Daud, who witnessed this exodus from the perspective of Christian Toledo, depicted the advancing Castilian forces as part of God’s plan to rescue the remnants of Andalusi Jewry from the violence and forced apostasy brought on by the Almohad uprising.

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The rebels against the Berber kingdoms had crossed the sea to Spain having wiped out every remnant of Jews from Tangiers to al-­ Mahdiyya. “Turn again thy hand as a grape-­gatherer upon the shoots (Jer. 6.9).” They tried to do the same thing in all of the cities of the Ishmaelite kingdom in Spain, “had it not been for the Lord who was on our side, let Israel now say (Ps. 124.1).” When the Jews had heard the report that the rebels were advancing upon them to drive them away from the Lord, God of Israel, those who feared the Lord’s word fled for their lives, and “fathers” almost “failed to look back to their children for feebleness of hands (Jer. 47.3).” Some were taken captive by the Christians, to whom they willingly indentured themselves on condition that they be rescued from Muslim territory. Others fled on foot, naked and barefoot, their feet stumbling upon the mountains of twilight (Jer. 13.16), with “the young children asking for bread and none to give it to them (Lam. 4.4).”17 As Ibn Daud’s account of the tragic fall of Andalusi Jewry continues, the focus is not on the existential crisis of mass destruction and conversion, but on the ultimate deliverance from these dangers. However, He who prepares the remedy before afflictions (God) put it into the heart of King Alfonso the Emperador to appoint our master and Rabbi, Rabbi Judah the Nasi ben Ezra, over Calatrava and to place all the royal provisions in his charge. The latter’s forefathers had been among the leaders of Granada, holders of high office and men of influence in every generation [as far back] as the reign of Badis ibn Habbus, the king of the Berbers, and that of the latter’s father, King Habbus. There is a tradition current among the members of the community of Granada that they are descended from the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the holy city, from the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, not from [the inhabitants of] the villages or of the unwalled towns. However, this R. Judah the Nasi, his father and uncles, all four of whom were officers, R. Isaac, the first-­born, and next to him R. Moses, the third R. Judah and the fourth R. Joseph, all of them are of royal blood and descend of the nobility, as evidenced by their personal traits.18 Echoing medieval chroniclers who wrote of the great deeds of kings and princes—and, like them, no doubt embellishing the details—Ibn Daud asserted

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the legitimacy of the ruling Jewish elites, emphasizing the great debt that other Jews owed to them. Their elevated position within Jewish society is merited by their family lineage and their personal characteristics. Moreover, their selfless work on behalf of the Jewish community is essential to the Jews’ very survival. Now, when this great Nasi, Rabbi Judah, was appointed over Calatrava, the city of refuge for the exiles, he supervised the passage of the refugees, released those bound in chains and let the oppressed go free by breaking their yoke and undoing their bonds. At his home and at his very table, where the refugees found rest, he fed the hungry, provided drink for the thirsty and clothed the naked. Then, providing animals for all the feeble, he had them brought as far as Toledo in great dignity. [This he was able to do] by virtue of the awe and respect which he commanded among the Christians, who conveyed them. Although but a youth, he had already been exalted above the people, and lorded it over a company of spearmen. Since he had no regard for silver, nor did he delight in gold (Isa. 13.17), he did not keep for himself any of his share of the king’s pay. . . . Indeed, if he had performed but these works of charity, his merit would have been more than enough, “for it was to save life that God sent him ahead” of the refugees (Gen. 45.5). When all the nation had finished passing over [the border] by means of his help (Josh. 4.1), the king sent him and appointed him lord of his household and ruler over all his possessions. Here Ibn Daud presents the transfer of Jews from Muslim to Christian Spain as a second foundation legend for Sephardic Jewry, echoing his earlier “Story of the Four Captives.” Just as that account offered an explanation for how legitimate religious authority passed from the Geonim of Baghdad to the rabbinic leadership of Córdoba, this passage traces the reestablishment of Andalusi elites in Christian Castile. Ibn Daud, himself a refuge from Córdoba who had arrived in Toledo with an earlier wave of exiles, uses each account to justify legitimate communal authority. Just as the emigration of Moses and his son Hanokh had represented the transition of Talmudic learning from East to West, so too did the establishment of Granadan Jewish elites in Castile represent the relocating of Jewish nobility from al-­Andalus to Christian Iberia. In both cases, Ibn Daud describes the instituting of Jewish communal authority as a manifestation of divine will. His message to his Jewish readership was

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clear. On a practical note, Jews owe a debt of gratitude and respect to Jewish grandees whose connection to royal power has imbued them with authority, even if Jewish law has not. Ibn Daud then underscores the political legitimacy of these courtiers within Jewish society by arguing that their authority is divinely sanctioned, implying that any challenge to their authority was tantamount to the rejection of God’s plan. While the details of these events might well have been embellished, they nevertheless offered a clear and powerful message to the survivors of the Almohad purge and their immediate descendants. Protection comes from God and through the Jewish leaders whose elevated position within society is proof of divine favor. Muslim tolerance can by overturned by revolution, and Christian lords are no better, generally speaking. Ibn Daud emphasizes that the Castilians did not offer the Jews refuge because of any essential affinity between the two cultures. Rather, royal needs and a well-­placed Jewish representative are what proved beneficial, at least for a given time and place. This message, while no doubt self-­serving for the Toledan elites whose authority Ibn Daud sought to strengthen, is one that articulates some fundamental truths regarding Jewish status in medieval Iberia. In many instances the difference between life and death was the presence of well-­placed Jews with the ear of the crown, the bishop, or another lord who could afford the Jews physical protection.19 And while Ibn Daud was making a case for the authority of certain Jewish clans in Castile, small groups of elites dominated Jewish communities throughout Christian Iberia. In Barcelona, one of the oldest and most important Jewish settlements on the peninsula, some of the more prominent Jewish families remained among the city’s Jewish oligarchy from the eleventh century until the community’s demise at the end of the fourteenth century.20

Early Jewish Settlements in Christian Iberia The account of Alfonso VII’s intervention at Calatrava also points to another historical reality that is sometimes overshadowed by the more dramatic and romanticized elements of Ibn Daud’s story; namely, that there already existed a highly developed Jewish community that was well integrated into Christian Iberia even before the arrival of the Andalusi Jewish refugees. As early as the ninth century, the Babylonian Geonim corresponded with the Jews of Christian Barcelona as well as those of Lucena. Indeed, though Barcelona was under Christian rule and Lucena under Muslim rule, the Geonim considered

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both communities to be within the same general designation of “Sepharad.” In the ninth century, the earliest period for which we have any information, significant references to the Jews in Christian cities of the Spanish March, such as Barcelona, Girona, and Besalú, begin to appear.21 The portrait that emerges is one of steadily developing Jewish settlements growing along with the cities in which they were located. Thus, centuries before the arrival of the main corpus of Andalusi Jews in the late twelfth century, there were small but thriving Jewish communities throughout Christian Iberia. The Jews of these communities owned land, traded with Christians, paid taxes, and served Christian lords much as their coreligionists did in the Muslim territories to the south.22 In this early period Jews lived throughout the kingdoms of León and Castile, and in some places, such as in the city of León, an active, well-­organized community seems to have been established as early as the tenth century. By the late eleventh century, there were about sixty Jewish households in Barcelona—a relatively large Jewish center for the era.23 In Castile, already in the eleventh century, a significant Jewish community at Burgos—emerging as the royal capital and an episcopal see, and an important stop along the Camino de Santiago—paid taxes to the crown that were used to help establish a new hospital for pilgrims en route to Compostela.24 In the Navarrese town of Estella, yet another stop along the pilgrim route to Santiago, there was a Jewish settlement by 1089. In June of that year, King Sancho Ramírez agreed to donate a portion of the regular taxes paid by the local Jews to the church of Santiago de Funes.25 Jewish life in these growing Christian cities was evidently viable. At the same time, Jewish life in al-­Andalus was becoming progressively more difficult, and while some prominent Jews in Córdoba managed to ally themselves with princely courts of the various taifa states, others seem to have begun to make their way northward at this time. Following the trade routes that connected Muslim and Christian cities, they laid the groundwork for the large migration of Andalusi Jews that was to come. In León there is evidence of Jews with Arabized names as early as the late ninth century and continuing throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries.26 Joseph ben Ferruziel, known as Cidellus, was born in the Muslim town of Cabra, near Lucena, but eventually made his way to Castile and entered into the service of its king, Alfonso  VI (r. 1072–1109). He acted as royal physician and assumed the position of nasi of Castilian Jewry in the mold of men such as Hasdai ibn Shaprut and the nasi Judah ibn Ezra. When King Alfonso conquered the region around Toledo in 1085, Ferruziel was active in ransoming the Jews of

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the town of Guadalajara, much as Judah ibn Ezra would do at Calatrava some sixty years later. In honor of Ferruziel’s intercession on behalf of the Jews there, Judah Halevi, who was intimately connected to Jewish communities in both Muslim and Christian Spain, composed a short poem for the great Castilian courtier. The poem, written in an Arabic form known as a muwashshah (in Romance, moaxaja), was among the first of its kind to be written in the Romance vernacular. Dexduand mieu Cidello vénid ¡tan buno albixara! Com’rayo de sol éxid En Wadalachyara

When by Cidellus arrived How pleasant the breeze A ray of sunlight In Guadalajara27

Alfonso VI made use of the services of several Jewish courtiers and granted charters to whole Jewish communities, such as the one at Miranda del Ebro, as early as 1099. Nor was Alfonso the first Hispano-­Christian king to include Jews in his court. In the Kingdom of León, Ramiro II (r. 931–51) employed Jewish diplomats, such as a certain Baruch, who went on an embassy to the caliph of Córdoba in 940.28 Just how far back these communities go is difficult to determine, but it seems likely that at least some of the Jews living under Visigothic rule continued to dwell in those lands that would eventually become the new kingdoms of León, Castile, Aragon, and the county of Catalonia.29 And just as there were small settlements in al-­Andalus about which we know little, there seem to have been Jewish settlements in Christian territories; the general tenor of Jewish life in each region was very likely not dissimilar, at least in the period before the Almohads. Nor were the Jews of the two regions disconnected from the other. For centuries Jews of al-­Andalus were oriented toward Christian lands as well as those of the southern Mediterranean. As early as the ninth century, Jewish merchants from Muslim Saragossa traveled north and east to the lands of Louis the Pious in France. Throughout the heyday of Jewish life in al-­Andalus, the Jews there traded regularly with the Christian territories of northern Iberia, helping to establish the associated social networks between and among Jews in each region.30 We know that Jewish merchants traded upriver from Tortosa to Tudela, bringing products from the Muslim world to the northern interior of the peninsula. This economic link between the Jewish and Muslim markets of the Mediterranean and developing towns of Christian Spain survived the transfer of power from Muslim to Christian

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lords. Following the Christian conquest of Tortosa in 1149, Count Ramon Berenguer IV sought to keep those trade routes open and flowing.31 Prior to the thirteenth century, the literary and legal production of the Jews in Christian Iberia did not match that of the communities to the south. Yet, from the point of view of socioeconomic history, most Jews in the north appear to have thrived during this early period. Indeed, during the last century of Jewish life in al-­Andalus, Jews in Christian lands arguably fared much better. Jewish success was generally tied to their real or perceived contributions to the local economy. Their value as an available tax base for their lords made them especially attractive to Christian kings, who realized that the Jews stood outside the feudal structure and thus could pay their taxes directly into the royal treasury, in support of military campaigns, building projects, and the patronage of the church. Indeed, about a hundred years before Judah ibn Ezra’s intervention on behalf of the Andalusi refugees at Calatrava, the Jews of León were already paying a regular rent (censu judaeorum) to Fernando I.32 But it was the connection of the Jews with trade and the associated fields of banking and tax-­gathering that attracted the attention of Iberian kings and barons alike. Here, as in other parts of Europe during the early and high Middle Ages, Christian monarchs saw Jewish merchants as economic catalysts, and ones that were more readily dependent on royal protection and thus loyal to royal authority. In 1084 the Bishop Rudiger of the German town of Speyer famously declared that his decision to issue a settlement charter to a group of Jews was to realize his desire “to make a city out of the village of Speyer,” declaring that “the glory of our town would be augmented a thousandfold if I were to bring Jews.”33 Spanish lords of varying categories agreed, and Jews could be found working closely with Christians throughout northern Iberia during this time. One Christian nobleman attacked the Jewish textile merchants who were in the employ of another and stole a sizeable quantity of silk. The second noble had “kept his Jews, who carried out his commerce, in his house” in a remote mountain village near Ourense in Galicia.34 Jews also participated in moneylending, as did many Christians, before the church began to intervene in the late twelfth century. This often meant lending money against agricultural land, and the use of products from that land, which were then resold.35 Jewish involvement in gold and silver smithing, their expertise in financial markets and in spotting counterfeit coins, as well as their close relationship to the monarchy all made them natural choices to assist the latter in minting coins—a royal monopoly at the time.

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The incoming Andalusi refugees thus encountered small but economically vigorous Jewish settlements in the Christian kingdoms, in a world that was steadily on the rise, just as theirs had begun to decay. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties were uniting Muslim Spain and transforming key aspects of its culture, Hispano-­Christian society was undergoing its own important transitions at the hands of a new generation of ambitious monarchs. By the mid-­twelfth century, around the same time that the Andalusi refugees were being ushered into Castile by the nasi Judah ibn Ezra, the powerful Count Ramon Berenguer IV had succeeded in uniting his domain with the Kingdom of Aragon, establishing the formidable federation that would forcefully challenge Castilian imperial claims to sovereignty over “all the Spains.” Much like their Muslim counterparts, many of these would-­be emperors sought to move beyond raiding and extracting tribute (parias) from wealthy Muslim cities. They aspired to build their own cities, conquer and expand others, assume vast powers above and beyond those of other Christian barons, and connect themselves through marriage and diplomacy to the most powerful institutions of Europe. The rest of Europe began to take note. Over the course of the eleventh century, King Sancho III of Navarre established an important relationship with the Burgundian monastery at Cluny, and King Sancho Ramírez of Aragon declared himself to be a vassal of the papacy. Not to be outdone, the Castilian crown also strengthened its ties to ecclesiastical institutions beyond Iberia. Most notably King Alfonso VI emerged as a major patron of the influential monastery at Cluny. He founded and converted existing monasteries in Castile to the French order, appointed the Cluniac monk Bernard of Sédirac as archbishop of Toledo, and even married Constance of Burgundy, the niece of Abbot Hugh of Cluny.36 In contrast to local clergy, those who arrived in Castile from France had no personal ties to other Castilian lords. This meant they were more dependent on royal patronage than the monks and bishops from Castilian noble families, and thus more reliable as royal advisors at home and as royal representatives abroad. In this way, these foreign-­born ecclesiastics performed a similar function as the Jews who were brought into royal service during this period. At the same time Cluniac monasteries in both France and Iberia also began to promote the Camino de Santiago, and new waves of pilgrims helped to bring León-­Castile into closer cultural contact with northern Europe. This process, in turn, helped to foster economic activity and urban development along the Camino, giving rise to a new middle class that

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included a fair number of pilgrims who stayed in Castile to take advantage of this new, dynamic society. It was during this same era that a series of popes began to take increased interest in the affairs of the Spanish kingdoms. When Ramiro I, the first king of an independent Kingdom of Aragon, died in battle against Muslim forces in 1063, news of his death helped rally more French support. Ramiro was connected to several French nobles through marriage, and his cause was championed by Pope Alexander II, who promised plenary indulgences for anyone fighting in Spain as part of a call to avenge Ramiro’s death. The pope announced that any French, Burgundian, or Norman knights that set out for Spain to fight against the Muslims there would receive remission of sins, effectively converting the siege of Barbastro into a crusade a generation before Urban II’s famous sermon at Clermont. When Pope Gregory VII succeeded Alexander II, he expanded his support for military intervention against the Muslims in Iberia and claimed spiritual sovereignty over all of Spain. Papal support for turning the border raids against al-­Andalus into a second front in a larger war between Christendom and the Islamic world was yet another conduit for armies, pilgrims, money, and new ideas to flow into the Spanish kingdoms from throughout Christian Europe.

Christian Expansion and Jewish Status The accelerated pace of Christian expansion at this time prompted a series of municipal and communal charters aimed at facilitating resettlement and civic development of recently conquered territories. The municipal charter, or fuero, was often granted by the crown and served as the governing body of law and customs for a given locale. Portions of fueros pertaining to Jews highlight royal interest in attracting and maintaining Jewish settlers through the promise of protecting Jewish life, property, and legal rights. In 1099 Alfonso VI of Castile gave the fuero of Miranda de Ebro to the entire populace of the town— “great men, or peasants, or Moors, or Jews”—demonstrating the crown’s interest in attracting settlers of all ranks and religions and forging them into a relatively integrated community. His general approach to legal equality among these disparate groups established a standard that was then repeated by a series of kings from Castile and Aragon and Navarre. After the conquest of the important hilltop town of Cuenca in 1177, Alfonso VIII of Castile articulated the royal position in the following manner: “I likewise grant to all settlers this

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prerogative: whoever may come to live in Cuenca, whatever condition he may be, whether Christian, Moor, or Jew, free or servile, should come in safety. He need not answer to anyone by reason of enmity, debt, bond, inheritance, mayordomia, merindadico, or any other thing he may have done before the conquest of Cuenca.”37 The Castilian notion of the town as a place in which all are free to come and make a new start would continue to characterize royal attitudes in all the Iberian kingdoms throughout the Middle Ages. Indeed, in these texts, laws that might be seen as disadvantageous to Jews are few and far between. These early Iberian charters routinely ignored the traditional prohibition on Jews holding positions of authority over Christians, which had its origins in Roman legislation and had been preserved in both Visigothic and canon law. While it was repeated in several Iberian charters and in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, it was almost universally ignored by Spanish kings, bishops, and other lords who granted Jews positions that afforded them power over Christians.38 Throughout the High Middle Ages, Jewish status in Christian Iberia was more commonly determined by royal and seigneurial needs than by ecclesiastical and legal traditions.39 The core of those needs was economic, and an early example of the sort of safeguards meant to protect and foster Jewish participation in the municipal economy is the influential fuero that Alfonso II of Aragon granted to the city of Teruel in 1176: We order that if a Christian and a Jew shall come to court over some matter, they shall appoint two citizens as judges, of whom one should be a Christian and the other a Jew, as the law orders. And if it should happen that their judgment does not please either of the two disputants, it shall be appealed to four judges who are citizens of Teruel, of whom two shall be Christians and the other two shall be Jews, and the case shall finish with those four judges, according to the law. Whoever shall appeal [the ruling of] these four judges should know that he will lose the case, as the law states. These judges shall examine and shall judge them only in accord with that which the fuero orders in Teruel. The witnesses between a Christian and a Jew shall be a Christian and a Jewish citizen [of Teruel], and anything that may be denied shall be believed and confirmed on the basis of their testimony. When the Christians want to have lawsuits, and the Jews likewise, they shall have them according to the law of Teruel, except for on the Sabbath and their festivals, according to the law.40

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These promises of legal protection hint at an important aspect of Jewish status at this time. Such safeguards did not emerge out of any preexisting legal or theological practice with regard to the Jews. On the contrary, they are strikingly new, and reflect the obvious concerns and stipulations of potential Jewish settlers. The requirement that an equal number of witnesses be drawn from each group, the preservation of equal rights of appeal, and the protection against Jews having to appear in court on the Sabbath and Jewish festivals clearly illustrate royal awareness of, and acquiescence to, Jewish demands. In addition to the legislation with reference to Jews contained within town charters, there were also instances of royal privileges written directly to Jewish communities. These Jewish communal fueros offer an even clearer picture of Jewish agency at this time. The degree to which Jewish leaders succeeded in obtaining legal protections for their communities can be seen in fueros granted to the Jews of Tortosa (c. 1149) and Tudela (c. 1115–70). At Tortosa, Jews are given their own quarter in the city, along with control over its protective wall, towers, and gates. They are granted rights to this neighborhood to “remain there safe and sound with all [their] goods and possessions for all times.” Such grants were not an example of impending ghettoization but rather a highly valued privilege of defense, which brought with it a measure of status. While it makes sense that the crown would be interested in protecting a group that it prized, the grant of physical control over their own quarter appears to be the result of Jewish petitioners rather than royal initiative.41 Elsewhere, the fuero of Tortosa is even more explicit on this matter. Count Ramon Berenguer IV declares: “If more Jews come to settle, I shall give them homes to occupy and to settle.” Here we see the Jewish commu­ nity’s concern that their allotted space, while sufficient for their current needs, might become overcrowded in the future. The absence of such clauses in most fueros underscores the particular foresight of Tortosa’s Jewish negotiators. Another passage that signals Jewish rather than royal concern states: “No Saracen shall exercise over you any authority or command.” Unlike most instances in which Christian occupation prompted the local Muslim population to abandon the city, Tortosa retained a sizable Muslim population after its conquest. This law responds to Jewish concerns regarding their status in relation to their former rulers.42 Another illuminating series of Jewish charters are those of Tudela, the first of which was granted following Christian conquest in 1115. Here its recipients were “all those who had left [Tudela]” during the siege, including the Jews who had lived there under Muslim rule. As the newly Christian city

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grew, so too did its Jewish community, and the latter received a new fuero in 1170 when it relocated to a fortified neighborhood.43 As at Tortosa, the Jewish community at Tudela was given control over the Jewish quarter and ownership of all property within it. The charter also makes a formal grant of a Jewish cemetery, another clear example of Jewish, rather than royal, interest. The fourth title of this later charter is even more explicit in its recognition of Jewish concerns, stating: “If certain men attack you violently in that fortress and it shall happen that these men be wounded or killed, on that account the Jews shall not pay for homicide nor receive punishment by fine, whether the incident be by day or night.”44 The charter puts Christian townsmen on notice: Not only were Jews going to be legally allowed to defend themselves, they would also be granted unprecedented latitude in their response to Christian attacks. While the addition of this clause in the later version of the charter may reflect increased tensions between Christians and Jews in Tudela, it also indicates the successful intervention of the city’s Jewish leaders. The latter emerge from these texts as an effective force in political negotiations, securing significant legal benefits for their community. These communities, in turn, appear to be valued by Christian authorities, both secular and religious, for their potential economic contributions to Spanish society at a time of its expansion and political ascendance. As these early Spanish charters indicate, the general vitality of Jewish life in the north did not preclude instances of interreligious hostility and violence. The tensions between “all the pleasures of Spain” that Andalusi Jews had come to enjoy and the religious and social isolation they felt as a minority similarly characterized Jewish life in Christian lands during this early period. Judah Halevi, whose career as merchant and physician took him to both Christian and Muslim Iberia, wrote of his ambivalence regarding Jewish life in Christian Toledo: “Esau [i.e. Christians] gave me what I asked, but in his heart never stopped conspiring against me, etc.”45 The division of medieval Spain into Muslim-­and Christian-­dominated territories makes it tempting to generalize about each by way of comparison. Such comparisons tend to privilege religious attitudes as determining factors in the development of a particular worldview, especially when it comes to interfaith relations. As a result there is a tendency to overemphasize the role that theology played in governing Christian-­Jewish interaction. But Christian attitudes toward the Jews were highly contextualized, determined as much by individual goals of self-­interest as by any overarching religious worldview. Thus while theologians sought to make their case for Christian truth, kings sought to establish

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law and order, including in the area of Jewish-­Christian relations, all the while asserting royal rights over Jewish taxes. For their part Christian townsmen saw their Jewish neighbors as potential competition, and at times potential partners, while during moment of chaos all would see the Jewish money and property as potential targets for plunder. To be sure, the Jews’ status as religious outsiders did play a role in the way Christians interacted with them. Just as Andalusi Jews were linked to Christians, and thus the Christian military threat, by their shared dhimmi status, so too were Jews in Hispano-­Christian territories associated with the Muslim enemy in the minds of many Christians. But religious zeal and xenophobia were always mixed with opportunism and predatory inclination against those unable to defend themselves. As an unarmed minority dependent on Muslim and Christian lords for protection, Jews were particularly vulnerable during periods of political instability or warfare, becoming easy targets for marauding soldiers and those who followed in their wake. This was a fact of life throughout medieval Jewish society, and one that characterized the Jews’ experience under both Muslim and Christian rule. In the period before the arrival of the Andalusi Jews, Castilian Jews suffered several attacks by Christian knights, especially those from France who had crossed the Pyrenees to fight Muslims and seek their fortune. In 1063 Pope Alexander II wrote to the bishops of Spain in support of their efforts to protect the Jews from such violence. In his letter the pope acknowledged that Jews and Muslims were both outsiders to the Christian community, but emphasized that, unlike the belligerent Muslims, Jews everywhere had demonstrated a willingness to live in service to Christians.46 Royal and ecclesiastical efforts to protect the Jews generally proved successful, but there were still exceptions. A massacre of Jews took place at Toledo in the early twelfth century, the result of a typically combustible mix of anti-­Jewish sentiment and political instability.47 Finally, the strengthening of ties to Cluny, the papacy, and other Catholic institutions during the twelfth century coincided with an increase in Christian missionary activity toward the Jews of Christian Iberia. This early interest in converting the Jews was little more than a harbinger of things to come, but it is one worth noting. In 1106 a prominent Jewish physician and intellectual named Moses converted to Christianity in Huesca, then the capital of the Christian kingdom of Aragon. He took the name Petrus Alfonsi to honor St. Peter as well as his new godfather, King Alfonso I of Aragon. Shortly after his conversion, Alfonsi composed a polemical treatise entitled

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Dialogi contra Iudaeos, which enjoyed almost immediate popularity with a wide readership and influenced generations of Christian missionaries and polemicists.

Andalusi Colonies and Their Impact This cultural and economic reorientation of the former Andalusi Jews toward Christian Europe did not signal the abandonment of their relationship with the Jewish communities of the Muslim world. Jews of Christian Iberia maintained commercial contacts with Jews of Muslim lands throughout the later Middle Ages, even as they strengthened cultural ties to Christian Europe. Jewish merchants from the Crown of Aragon, in particular, connected to the mercantile centers of the Italian Peninsula and North Africa, both directly and through the crown’s territories of Provence and Mallorca. Some Jewish merchants and intellectuals living in Christian Iberia continued to study and use Arabic, both in its scholarly modes and in the less formal Judeo-­Arabic dialect that remained popular among merchants. In the lands of Castile and the Crown of Aragon, too, Jews continued to study Arabic as an important tool for trade, politics, and intellectual inquiry. As was the case in Muslim al-­Andalus, Christian rulers routinely selected members of the Jewish community to act as their representatives in tax collection and as their business liaisons with other lords, the church, and the towns. The knowledge of Arabic made Jews in the service of Christian lords particularly valuable in diplomatic missions to Muslim rulers in southern Spain and North Africa, and as scribes entrusted with the drafting of capitulation treaties for defeated Muslim forces.48 Even after the conquest of these new territories, bilingual Jewish courtiers continued to serve in a diplomatic capacity as the Spanish kingdoms began to normalize political relations with the Muslim rulers of Granada and North Africa.49 Jewish merchants and administrators also served Christian military orders such as the knights of Santiago, Calatrava, and the Templars, which were active in the conquest of Muslim territory. The heads of these crusading orders rewarded Jewish service much as Christian monarchs did, with the rights to lands and, in at least one case, castles.50 As with social and economic contacts, Jewish intellectuals of Muslim Spain had also established ties to those living in Christian Europe even before their mass exodus. By the eleventh century, at least, Andalusi Jews were in contact with the Jews of Provence as much as with the rabbinic centers of

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North Africa. Certainly, when it came to emigration, the Andalusi Jews of the twelfth century chose southern France over any Muslim land, near or far. The famous case of Maimonides, whose family eventually fled south to Fez and from there to Fustat, appears to have been an exception, and even he remained tethered to the larger Sephardic enclave in the towns and cities of southern France. This area, known as Provence, or “Provintzah” in Hebrew, encompassed the regions of Languedoc, Roussillon, and the Comtat Venaissin as well as Provence proper and for much of this period formed part of the political and cultural world of Christian Iberia. Indeed, the close relationship between the Provençal Sephardim and those who remained in Iberia was eventually strengthened by the northern expansion of Catalonia-­Aragon. From 1172 until the end of the fourteenth century, the town of Perpignan and the surrounding county of Roussillon fell within the political sphere of the Crown of Aragon.51 Although it retained a sense of autonomy throughout this period, its prominent Jewish community remained culturally and socially tied to the Jews of Catalonia, and more broadly to the other communities in the federated Crown of Aragon. Echoing the practice that Ibn Daud had recorded regarding the Jews of Toledo, the new Jewish communities of southern France were also established around many of the same clans that had enjoyed prominence in al-­ Andalus. In a famous letter to his editor and translator in Provence, Samuel ibn Tibbon, Maimonides mentions several of the great scholar dynasties of al-­Andalus, many of whom reestablished themselves in Provence. Perhaps chief among these was Samuel’s father, Judah ibn Tibbon, a Granadan scholar who fled to the town of Lunel and there founded one of the leading intellectual dynasties in southern France. Hailing from Granada, the elder Ibn Tibbon brought with him an enduring admiration for the great golden age polymath Samuel ibn Naghrilla, whom he continued to promote as the model of Andalusi Jewish culture. As described in the previous chapter, the famous nagid had combined a successful carrier as courtier with that of a poet, linguist, and Talmudist, and Ibn Tibbon continued to treat his various writings as roadmaps to a successful Jewish leadership. Indeed, the persistent dedication to ‘arabiyya among the Andalusi Jews living in Provence was a marked characteristic of these Jews, even in Christian lands. Ibn Tibbon and his fellow refugees imbued their descendants with a respect for the practical and religious importance of the sort of Jewish intellectual curriculum that had sustained them for generations in al-­Andalus. Fearing that this intellectual heritage might soon be lost, an aging Ibn Tibbon

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penned an ethical will in which he urged his son, Samuel, to continue to follow the central tenets of the classical Andalusi curriculum. Throughout the text, Judah reprimands young Samuel for not dedicating himself more fully to his studies and reminds him that mastery of both Arabic and Hebrew grammar, penmanship, and literary style was a key to the Jews’ success, even in their adopted land. Seven years and more have passed since thou didst begin to learn Arabic writing, but despite my entreaties thou hast refused to obey. Yet thou art well aware how our foremost men only attained high distinction through their proficiency in Arabic writing. Thou hast already seen what the Nagid (of blessed memory) has recorded as to his rise to power being solely due to this cause, when he sang: “O Pen, I tell of thy kindness!” Similarly with his son. In this country, too, as well as in the kingdom of Ishmael the Nasi, Rabbi Shesheth, acquired wealth and honor through his Arabic.52 Nor hast thou acquired sufficient skill in Hebrew writing, though I paid, as thou must remember, thirty golden pieces annually to thy master, the clever R. Jacob son of the generous R. Obadiah. And when I persuaded him to teach thee to write the letters, he answered: “It will be enough for him to learn one letter a year.” If thou hadst paid attention to this remark of his, thou wouldst have striven to become a better scribe than he or his sons. Hast thou not seen R. Shesheth’s son, a boy of twelve, whose writing so resembles that of his teacher, R. Patur, that the scripts are indistinguishable? Handwriting is but an art, and with attention, intelligence, and practice, anyone can imitate his model. Thou art still young and improvement is possible, if Heaven but grant thee the helping gift of desire and resolution, for ability is of no avail without inclination. . . . Therefore my son! Stay not they hand when I have left thee, but devote thyself to the study of the Torah and to the science of medicine. But chiefly occupy thyself with the Torah, for thy hast a wise and understanding heart, and all that is needful on thy part is ambition and application. I know that thou wilt repent of the past, as many have repented before thee of their youthful indolence. In many ways Judah’s fatherly complaints continue to resonate nearly nine hundred years later. Indeed, his exasperation with Samuel’s laziness, as well

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as his reminder of the cost of private Hebrew lessons and his reference to a younger neighbor who has exceled where his own son has failed might still strike a chord with some modern readers. It also seems that his stern rebuke was unwarranted, or else was taken very much to heart. Young Samuel quickly established himself as a philosopher and physician of note, and as a master of both Arabic and Hebrew. His proficiency in both languages was such that he emerged as the principal translator of Maimonides’ Arabic works into Hebrew. In his translations and original works, the younger Ibn Tibbon fulfilled and, indeed, surpassed his father’s hopes.53 The translation movement of Arabic texts into Hebrew to which the Tibbonid clan was central began even before the exodus of Jews out of al-­ Andalus. Already in the eleventh century, Moses ibn Gikatilla, who was part of the last great generation of Jewish scholars in Córdoba, fled to the taifa of Saragossa after the fall of the caliphate. He translated two grammar books written by Judah Hayyuj from Arabic to Hebrew and wrote his own grammar regarding Hebrew nouns. A contemporary of Ibn Gikatilla in Saragossa, Jonah ibn Janah, extolled the virtue of translators and compared them to warriors defending Jewish tradition and preparing for the Jews’ metaphorical to return to their ancestral “homeland” of Jewish knowledge and identity.54 Abraham bar Hiyya, who flourished a generation after Ibn Janah, was a pioneering translator of Greco-­Arabic philosophy and science into Hebrew who spent most of his career in Christian Barcelona. In addition to composing his own Hebrew works on mathematics and astronomy, Bar Hiyya also collaborated with Christian partners such as Plato of Tivoli in translating Arabic and Hebrew works, including his own, into Latin.55 Toward the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth, the Hebrew translation movement also saw major contributions from scholars in Toledo, such as Judah ben Eleazar and Judah Alharizi, and in Barcelona, such as Judah ibn Hasdai. Arabic remained an important language of scholarship for Spanish Jews, even as Hebrew translations of important works became available. In thirteenth-­century Toledo, almost two hundred years after its initial conquest by Castile, the scientist and translator Judah ben Solomon Ha-­Kohen was still able to compose works in Arabic. Another Toledan Jew of this later period, the poet Todros Abulafia, acknowledged that fixing Jewish poems to Arabic melodies continued to be standard practice among the Castilian Jews.”56 Even in the fourteenth century, Joseph ibn Waqar of Toledo still composed original scholarly works in Arabic. However, the preservation of Arabic among the Jews in Christian Spain was not

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universal. Thus while the rabbis of thirteenth-­century Barcelona could not find anyone with sufficient command of Arabic to translate Maimonides’ Commentary on the Mishnah, there were those in neighboring Aragon who could complete the book. But it was among the Jews who settled in Provence that the Arabic-­into-­ Hebrew movement reached its greatest heights. The task of opening up the extensive literary heritage of al-­Andalus to a new audience of European Jews was one that required more than the mechanical rendering of Arabic texts into Hebrew prose. It also involved the much more complicated enterprise of explaining classical Greek science and philosophy, much of which had also been summarized and explained in Arabic by an array of Muslim and Jewish authors. For instance, to produce a viable Hebrew translation of Maimonides’ philosophical masterwork, The Guide for the Perplexed, Samuel ibn Tibbon was forced to produce a dictionary to explain new and difficult terms in the text. These words and expressions were not only linguistically unfamiliar to European Jews but often conceptually foreign as well. The essential framework of Greek philosophy was one that required explanation, as did many of the Hebrew words that Maimonides employed metaphorically. The act of translation was often one of composition as well, requiring the translator to expand on some of the more difficult and intricate aspects of the work he was translating. At first the Jews of Provence were primarily interested in translations of Andalusi texts by Jewish authors with Jewish themes, including treatises on Hebrew grammar, Jewish ethics, and theology. These included Judah Halevi’s Book of the Kuzari, a defense of rabbinic Judaism; Bahya ibn Paquda’s ethical treatise, Duties of the Heart; and two pioneering works on Hebrew grammar by Jonah ibn Janah (The Book of the Roots and The Book of the Many-­Colored Flower Beds). The subjects of these works were very much in line with traditional Jewish sensibilities, making them accessible to pious Jews of any region. Nonetheless, they also employed rationalist methodologies that had become standard among the Arabized Jews of al-­Andalus but were still quite novel to most other Jewish audiences. As such, texts that had become classics of Jewish learning among the Jews of Arab lands were now seen as revolutionary and even inflammatory in the cultural setting of southern France. For this reason the translation movement met with a divided response from Jews in Iberia and Provence. While an eager market existed for new knowledge and new means of interpreting sacred texts, many saw these Andalusi imports as unwanted innovations to an established sacred tradition.

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Indeed, intellectual innovation in general was often viewed as suspect in the medieval world, especially as it related to understanding theology, religious law, and custom. This was particularly evident when the bearers of new ideas and methodologies were seen as newcomers or outsiders to a particular community. Judah ibn Tibbon complained that “the habit of many people these days is to harass and attack whomever among their contemporaries introduces innovations, either in translation, writing or related matters.”57 Nor should we imagine that these divisions fell along purely cultural lines. While Judah ibn Tibbon reminded his son that the foremost men in their community had gained prominence through their knowledge of Arabic, this did not mean that all émigrés continued to speak Arabic, let alone write it, for long. By the second generation after the exile from al-­Andalus, continued use of, or facility with, Arabic was another factor that separated certain elites within the Jewish communities from other Jews. Throughout Christian Iberia and Provence, only a relatively small number of Jews could effectively compete for lucrative jobs as translators and diplomats or engage in long-­distance commerce to Muslim lands.

* * * The twelfth-­century Jewish scholar and traveler Benjamin of Tudela considered the Christian territories of Navarre and Castile to be part of the land of Sepharad. His Hebrew travel account also contained many Castilian/ Romance loan words, suggesting a degree of influence of Latinate culture at a time when Sephardic society is often seen as uniformly Arabized. Benjamin’s perspective on the Hispano-­Jewish world of his day should prompt us to rethink the notion that the Arabized Jews of al-­Andalus were essentially synonymous with Iberian Jewry until the upheavals of the Almohad period, when they relocated that society to Christian Spain. Such a diachronic division of medieval Sephardic history into an earlier Muslim period in which Jews became Arabized and a later Christian period is too simplistic. The small subset of Andalusi Jews who can be identified as an intellectual elite may well have seen themselves as part of a wide-­ranging Jewish cultural milieu oriented toward North Africa and the Levant rather than toward the Jewish communities of Christian Europe, but other Andalusi Jews were simultaneously connected to the world of Latin Europe well before their emigration. This relationship emphasizes the fact that dynamic and well-­integrated Jewish communities developed in Christian Iberia alongside those of al-­Andalus

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from the ninth to the mid-­twelfth century. In particular, the presence of Jewish courtiers in the service of Christian lords at the time of the Almohad persecutions was an essential factor in the successful transfer of the surviving elements of Andalusi Jewry from Muslim to Christian Iberia. During this period of transition, the Jews in Christian Iberia were valued subjects of Iberia’s Christian kings, even as their relationship with their Christian neighbors could be strained. The century following the Christian conquest of Toledo in 1085 was a period of urban expansion in which the Jews were important participants and clear beneficiaries. But perhaps the most significant developments in Jewish history from this period took place within Jewish society. By the closing years of the twelfth century, the first and second generation of Andalusi émigrés had begun to transform Jewish culture, first in southern France and rapidly in the rest of Europe and the wider Mediterranean world. Most notably, the Sephardic scholars and translators who had settled in Provence introduced the Jews of Europe to the considerable intellectual heritage of al-­Andalus. Yet it was not long before their efforts prompted a backlash from those unwilling to accept these new ideas and methods. By the early thirteenth century, Jewish scholars and communal leaders from Castile to Paris were embroiled in one of the most heated disputes in Jewish history, initiating a chain of controversies that came to dominate European Judaism for generations.

CHAPTER 3

Conflict and Confluence in the Thirteenth Century

The majority of Andalusi Jewry fled northward into the expanding kingdoms of Christian Iberia and across the Pyrenees into southern France. Their new Christian lords generally greeted them with enthusiasm, seeing in these refugees the potential for greater economic development, settlement of newly conquered cities, and an opportunity for the expansion of royal power. And for their part Jewish leaders secured their position under Christian rule with great diplomatic skill and foresight. Although their poets wrote bitter laments about the loss of their homes and patrons in the south, most p ­ robably saw their transition to Christian rule as a welcome respite from Almohad persecution. As they moved northward the Jews of al-­Andalus settled among native Jewish communities that had inhabited the Spanish kingdoms for centuries, a process aided by well-­placed Jewish courtiers. The integration of these two Jewish cultures was not always smooth. Indeed, the protracted debates over communal leadership and modes of religious interpretation that began in the late twelfth century would come to dominate Iberian Jewry for the next century and a half. This clash of Jewish cultures, unprecedented in its size and scope, sent shockwaves throughout the Jewish communities of Europe, North Africa, and the Levant, threatening the very nature of rabbinic Judaism. In the end, catastrophe would be avoided by the intervention and leadership of two rabbinic scholars in Catalonia and with the emergence of a new form of Jewish spirituality among a new generation of mystical scholars in Castile. These internecine debates regarding the true meaning of Judaism also played out against growing tensions between the Jews and the surrounding Christian society. As the crown, the church, the municipalities, and the

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independent local Jewish communities (aljamas) all developed substantially over the course of the late thirteenth century, their interests set them on something of a collision course with one another. Christian attitudes toward the Jews in their midst became increasingly belligerent during this period, but their treatment of the Jews as a unified group missed the deep intellectual and social divisions that characterized Jewish society in this era of communal expansion and turmoil.

Intellectual Life: The Struggle for Synthesis Maimonides (1138–1204) left Córdoba with his family at the age of ten and spent most of his life in Cairo. Nevertheless, in modern histories of the Jews, Maimonides is often presented as a “Spanish” thinker and included in the long list of Jewish luminaries who make up the “golden age” of Spanish Judaism. From the point of view of general intellectual and religious history, this approach has merit. Maimonides was, in many ways, a paradigmatic Andalusi Jewish scholar. When he and his family fled Spain, he brought with him the full curriculum of Andalusi Judaism, which later deeply informed his legal and philosophical writings. However, Maimonides’ impact on the history of the Jews in medieval Spain far transcended his role as an exemplar of the Andalusi intellectual tradition. His own particular formulation of that Andalusi heritage was read back into Hispano-­Jewish society, principally and notably by fellow exiles living in Provence, and had an incalculable impact on the course of Jewish religious development in late-­medieval Spain and beyond. Samuel ibn Tibbon (c. 1165–1232), who translated Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed from Arabic into Hebrew, was the immediate conduit for Maimonides’ thought in Europe and part of a larger movement that opened European Jewry to Greco-­Arabic science and philosophy. The Jewish communities in Christian Spain and southern France formed a common cultural zone, and Jewish scholars moved easily among the communities of Castile, Catalonia-­Aragon, and Provence, studying with and disputing one another. Here the intellectual traditions of northern Europe and Muslim lands would clash, setting in motion a cultural conflict over the core values of Judaism that would consume Jewish scholars for much of the next two centuries. These ongoing conflicts, peaking in the 1230s and then again in the first decade of the fourteenth century, would come to be known as the Maimonidean controversies. In Iberia these controversies emanated from two great

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Jewish rabbinic centers in Castile (Burgos and Toledo) and two in Catalonia (Barcelona and Girona). In Provence the center of the conflict was the community of Montpellier. The themes involved included not only the place of philosophy in Jewish learning but also the permissibility of the study, dissemination, and popularization of mystical lore. But behind all of these polemics and treatises, the open letters and communal bans, stood two essential questions. The first was: What, exactly, was the nature of Judaism? And the second was: Just who had the right to answer this first question? In the twelfth century some Jews were already involved in translating Arabic and Judeo-­Arabic works into Hebrew, making them available to a new Jewish readership. Much of this material was scientific and philosophical and thus considered “foreign” knowledge. Despite the potential for opposition, this early stage was characterized instead by an avid interest in these works among the Jews of Provence and northern Spain. One of the earliest protagonists of this movement, Abraham bar Hiyya, recognized both the interest in new fields of study and the potential opposition that his translations might encounter among other Jews. In the introduction to his most important book on mathematics, The Foundations of Understanding and the Tower of Faith, Bar Hiyya defended his work, arguing: “I did not undertake this task of my own will, nor to gain glory. Rather, many among the great in my generation, whose advice I am obliged to take, have urged me to do so because there was not one single book written in Hebrew on these matters in the whole of France. Therefore, I translated them from Arabic books into Hebrew to the best of my ability.”1 As his title suggests, Bar Hiyya asserts that his intent was to strengthen Jewish knowledge and devotion, not to challenge it, a sentiment echoed by many Andalusi émigrés and their disciples. Another of the early central figures in the Arabic-­into-­Hebrew movement was Abraham ibn Ezra. A native of Tudela while it was still under Muslim rule, he spent much of his early career in Córdoba before being driven out by the arrival of the Almohads. He left the Iberian Peninsula as a mature scholar in his forties, well versed in the philosophy, poetry, and scientific and exegetical traditions of Andalusi Jewry, and traveled widely in Italy, England, and southern France. A master of a wide variety of subjects including mathematics and astronomy, Ibn Ezra made a particular impact on the Jews of Christian Europe as the first Sephardic scholar to compose biblical commentaries in Hebrew. His fellow émigré, Judah ibn Tibbon, credited Ibn Ezra with being the primary conduit for the traditional Sephardic approach to sacred texts into Europe, noting: “The exiles of France and throughout Christian lands

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do not know Arabic so that these [Arabic] works were a sealed book to them, inaccessible, unless translated into the sacred tongue . . . until the sage Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra arrived in their lands and aided them with short compositions.”2 These short compositions, or manuals, did indeed make an outsized impact on European Judaism. Ibn Ezra’s undeniable erudition but difficult, often cryptic, style prompted both widespread veneration and a long tradition of supercommentaries, or glosses on his commentaries, as generations of scholars struggled to understand and explain his mode of biblical interpretation. Others were less taken with his work, suspicious of his motivations for taking such a new and potentially controversial approach toward reading Judaism’s most sacred texts. Abraham ibn Ezra’s explanation of why he set out to write his treatise on the reason for the divine commandments, Yesod Mora, is revealing: The awe-­inspiring God knows my heart’s sincerity. For I did not compose this book to show that I mastered the sciences or to glorify myself by showing that secrets have been revealed to me. Neither did I write it in order to argue with our ancient sages, for I surely know that they were wiser and more God fearing than I. I composed this book for a revered noble individual whom I taught the books that I wrote for him. I troubled myself to compose a book for him dealing with the commandments only because of my great love for him, for I found him to be a person of integrity whose fear of the Lord exceeds that of most men.3 Ibn Ezra’s posture of humility, while a common trope in medieval introductions, is couched in ways that illuminate the sorts of sensitive issues associated with opening up new audiences to the vast corpus of Judeo-­Arabic learning. Successive generations of Provençal Jewish scholars who were trained in a Hebrew curriculum influenced by the grammatical and philosophical legacies of al-­Andalus continued to exhibit a similarly apologetic attitude with regard to this “new” learning. Others, from Abraham ibn Daud to Maimonides and Samuel ibn Tibbon, prefaced their philosophical works with a warning that few of their readers would be successful in understanding the complex lessons they had to impart. Such statements reflect an awareness that the Andalusi intellectual tradition had competition from other Jewish subcultures, particularly within Europe, regarding the guardianship and advancement of Jewish

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sacred literature. In Spain the most significant challenge came not from the native Jewish communities into which the Andalusi immigrants had integrated, but from the great rabbinic centers of northern France and the Rhine Valley known in Hebrew as “Tzarfat” and “Ashkenaz,” respectively. By the thirteenth century, when the majority of Andalusi Jews had effectively resettled in Christian Iberia and Provence, they came into regular contact with the Jewish scholarly traditions of northern Europe, in particular the deep and abstract interpretation of Talmudic literature then popular among the French Tosafists (glossators) and their disciples. In the face of these new intellectual traditions, some Sephardic scholars sought to reassert their own methods of studying rabbinic texts.4 Judah ibn Abbas, author of the thirteenth-­ century Ya’ir Nativ (Enlightener of the Path), emphasized that the study of the work of the Tosafists and other commentaries on the Talmud was a waste of time, since the sole purpose of the Talmud was to be a source for applied law.5 Such attacks on trends from northern Europe should not be taken as evidence of a Sephardic cultural norm, however. Rather, they can be seen as an extension of the longstanding and universal Jewish rejection of any intellectual or religious tradition that was foreign to one’s own scholarly circle. Thus defense of “Sephardic” practices should be read not as representative of the attitudes of a broad cultural community but rather as an assertion on behalf of self-­ deputized representatives who sought to promote their own intellectual customs and norms over those being adopted by their neighbors. The trait being reflected here is the internal competition and maneuvering among Jewish intellectuals, not the articulation of a shared cultural ethos. Attitudes toward Maimonidean writings in Spain were bound up with several interconnected issues. The question of Maimonides’ reliance on Aristotelian thought in his great philosophical treatise, the Guide for the Perplexed, for example, was hotly debated among the distinct intellectual subcultures of Ibero-­Provençal Jews. Particularly alarming for his detractors was the fact that Maimonides not only treated Aristotelian scientific and philosophical principles as useful tools for the understanding of scripture but also implied that they represented the essence of Judaism. Rejecting this particular philosophical reading of Judaism was thus tantamount to rejecting the true meaning of revelation, a position that disturbed many even among the more philosophically inclined. Samuel ibn Tibbon made even more explicit Maimonides’ position that the study of the philosophical aspects of Torah and Talmud was nothing less than the recovery of Judaism’s hidden truth. He notes: “I have seen that [philosophic] truths which had been concealed [within Jewish tradition]

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ever since the times of our prophets and sages are known widely today among the nations of the world. . . . That is why I revealed what I did in this treatise [Ma’amar Yiqqavu ha-­Mayim] and in my Commentary on Ecclesiastes; matters that no one has ever revealed.”6 Even more problematic was Maimonides’ inclusion of this same philosophical material in the first book of the Mishneh Torah, a comprehensive code of Jewish law written in a clear and elegant Hebrew and far more accessible to Jewish merchants and communal officials than the Guide. The Mishneh Torah, completed in 1180, had enjoyed unprecedented popularity since its appearance, serving as a concise reference tool that could be used (without reference to the Talmud) for adjudication of civil and commercial matters. For most Jews its utility far outweighed any theological issues it might have raised. However, Maimonides’ presentation of philosophy as the ultimate reason behind the commandments and the practice of Jewish law meant that the use of the Mishneh Torah could entail a tacit acceptance of this somewhat radical worldview, provoking the ire of a considerable sector of the rabbinic community. With the Mishneh Torah Maimonides had created a legal code that summarized the vast rabbinic tradition contained in the Talmud. It found instant popularity in Spain, where communal leaders, judges, merchants, and others saw it as an effective reference tool for applying the ancient religious traditions that governed all facets of Jewish life. This streamlining had a drawback, however; others among the intelligentsia were concerned by what they deemed to be a disregard for local customs and legal practices. The same comprehensive character of the Mishneh Torah that made it a valuable tool to some made it too sweeping of a change for others. Moreover, scholars from Toledo to Posquières took issue with what they saw as a disturbing reliance on philosophical allegory in Maimonides’ biblical interpretation and general methodology, particularly in the section of the Mishneh Torah entitled the Book of Knowledge (Sefer ha-­Madda). Long before the great sage had died, these early critics sought to ban the study of his works. These initial efforts failed, but the battle lines had begun to be drawn. By the 1230s the debate had broadened from complaints about Maimonides’ himself to the pernicious influence of his work among a new generation of scholars and students in Iberia and Provence. Especially disturbing was their tendency to read the text of the Bible as a philosophical allegory. By this time Samuel ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation of the Guide for the Perplexed had begun to circulate, as well as several of Ibn Tibbon’s own philosophically

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inspired treatises. The anti-­Maimonideans presented themselves as staunch traditionalists defending standard interpretations of the Torah from methodologies derived from foreign (i.e., Greek) learning. Some directed their ire at Maimonides, while others sought to preserve his honor and integrity, arguing that it was his disciples who were to blame for translating and popularizing his work among those not able to comprehend its nuances. Calls to ban Maimonides’ works soon evolved into calls to ban the study of philosophy in the name of Torah and tradition. These demands were met with staunch opposition throughout the broad sweep of Hispano-­Provençal Jewry from scholars who defended the use of Greek philosophy and science as legitimate, indeed critical, tools for understanding Judaism. For this faction the way in which Maimonides had integrated philosophy into his understanding of Judaism bordered on the prophetic. Aaron ben Meshullam of Lunel, an acolyte of Maimonides who died only a few years after him, describes him in quasi-­prophetic terms, comparing him via allusion to his biblical namesake: “For in truth God sent him to His people as a source of life. He saw the weakness of their jurists, while the condition of the children of Israel progressively worsened. And he [Maimonides] . . . stretched his mighty rod over the sea of the Talmud so that the children of Israel could walk on dry land in the midst of the sea.”7 Maimonides’ stature among the Jews of Spain was such that his works had already achieved a quasi-­canonical status by the early thirteenth century. By the end of the century, even anti-­Maimonideans acknowledged his greatness, and the principal focus of the debates had shifted to the proper interpretation of those works. These Jewish debates over philosophical rationalism did not take place in a cultural vacuum. Throughout this period Jewish intellectuals in Christian Iberia and Provence engaged their Christian neighbors, as well as each other, with unprecedented vigor and productivity. Hispano-­Christian society was undergoing a parallel resurgence, with a vital intellectual culture. Both in Iberia proper and in the associated territories of Languedoc and Roussillon, Jewish scholars found themselves confronted by Christian counterparts who had confidently integrated various elements of Greek philosophy into their own religious worldview. By the thirteenth century, secular knowledge that built on Greek-­style reason—whether in the form of logic, medicine, philosophy, or any of the other related fields of the sciences—had become the common ground of medieval intellectual culture. While some Jewish scholars continued to see such secular studies as foreign to Jewish tradition and thus inherently corrosive to the development of

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Jewish piety, others considered such an isolationist stance to be even more dangerous. Among these was Samuel ibn Tibbon’s student and son-­in-­law, Jacob Anatoli, who complained that Jewish exegetes were suffering from their rejection of logic and rationalism as key elements of biblical study. “The Lord has so thoroughly baffled the [Jewish] nation during this current Exile that we have become a source of derision among the nations on account of [our lack of recognition of] the philosophic wisdom in the Torah and [our inadequate performance of] the commandments found in it.”8 Anatoli went on to argue that Jews needed to become proficient in this “system of knowledge” in order to defend the intellectual honor of their religious community. “It is known that a man has no might with which to stand against the clever ones among the nations who disagree with us, if he does not learn this system of knowledge. Because I saw that the evil boasters who flaunt over us by way of debate and dialectics have increased, I was jealous of them, I, Jacob son of Rabbi Anatoli, and my passion was aroused to translate this system of knowledge.”9 Interestingly enough, rabbis who were both for and against greater engagement with secular knowledge cite similar motivations for their positions— namely, the need to protect Jews living in a religiously and intellectually hostile environment. Living as a religious minority within a confident and assertive rival culture was a perpetual challenge to medieval Jews. Jewish leaders felt this challenge most acutely, and their writing displays a deep concern with how best to protect the sanctity of their religious traditions as well as the honor of their community within what was often seen as an inherently hostile atmosphere. Within this context, arguments for the centrality of rationalism in Jewish thought were turned outward, as a key critique of Christian doctrine, as well as inward, as an attack against Jewish traditionalists who saw Greek-­style rationalism as alien to Jewish exegesis. One fourteenth-­century scholar, Joseph ben Shoshan of Toledo, derided philosophers as “evil p ­ eople who disobeyed the commandments,” adding that “he who is not fearful of sin does not learn what to do and does not study for the sake of Heaven, so for him it will be enough to engage in dialectics and to behave arrogantly towards his peers, and he will not take notice of the principle of punctiliousness in observance.”10 Most of those who criticized the essence and diffusion of Maimonidean learning in Spain and Provence did so by attacking various aspects of his thought, from his use of philosophical rationalism and analogy, to the unsettling popularity of his law code, the Mishneh Torah, and its potential impact on Talmudic study and interpretation. For the most part, however, the anti-­Maimonidean faction did not articulate a full alternative system. That

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role was filled by a new trend in Jewish mystical speculation that came to the fore at this time: Kabbalah.

Revealing and Concealing Secrets: The Rise of Spanish Kabbalah Resettlement in the lands of Christian Iberia and Provence also resulted in greater contact with the Jewish centers of France and Germany that had reached their own “golden age” in the tenth through twelfth centuries. The result was an exchange of students and ideas between the two Jewish subcultures that had previously been far less engaged with each other. The borderlands of Catalonia and Languedoc rapidly developed into a fertile region for the confluence of Jewish ideas. And just as European Jews were being introduced to the world of Greco-­Arabic science and Hebrew grammar, Iberian Jews began to study another interpretation of what the esoteric or “hidden” nature of Judaism was, which had become popular in northern Europe. The emergence of Kabbalah in Spain during the thirteenth century, from its roots in twelfth-­century Provence, was a product of this cultural exchange, as well as a response to the larger debate over the role of philosophy within Judaism. The battle between proponents of Neoplatonic-­inspired Kabbalah and Aristotelian philosophy can thus be seen as a new chapter in an older debate over intellectual postures within the medieval Jewish world. That said, both the level of creativity and productivity that characterized the birth of Spanish Kabbalah amounted to a full-­scale revolution within Judaism whose impact is still felt today. The Hebrew term “Kabbalah” is fairly innocuous, simply meaning “received tradition.” But by the thirteenth century the term began to enjoy greater circulation among Iberian Jews as a reference to a specific esoteric tradition that claimed to represent the deepest, inner meaning of Judaism. Against the Maimonidean-­rationalistic interpretation of God’s commandments, the kabbalists developed a hermeneutical system that linked all actions to ten emanations (sefirot) of/within God. Looking back on the origins of the movement in Spain, the fourteenth-­century kabbalist Meir ben Solomon ibn Sahula noted that these men “in our generation and in the preceding generations, for two hundred years, are called kabbalists, and they call the science of the ten sefirot and some of the reasons for the commandments by the name Kabbalah.”11

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What emerged at this time was a highly complex system expounded in symbolic, mystical language and imagery. Within this new framework everything from human actions to the Torah itself was understood to be composed of a set of symbols that hint at a deeper, secret truth. It is important to note that the scholars at the center of this revolution saw themselves as following a uniquely Jewish tradition. For Maimonides and his followers the hidden meaning of the Jewish tradition was associated with physics and metaphysics, and thus potentially discoverable by all people via human reason. By contrast, the esoteric system embraced by kabbalists was uniquely embedded in the Hebrew language and its understanding vouchsafed by God to the Jewish people. One of the leading voices in this new movement, Joseph Gikatilla, argued that “all of the wise men of the gentile nations move about the circumference of the circle, and their intention is to attain the inner point, but they have nothing upon which to rely in order to know that point, since the Torah has not been transmitted to them.”12 For Gikatilla “Torah” was more than the biblical text revered by Jews and Christians alike. Here it represents the inner meaning of scripture known only to those adepts who dedicated themselves to the study and methodologies of the Kabbalah. Without the mastery and application of this system, the true meaning of religion and of the mysteries of the universe would remain out of reach. And just as “Torah” meant more than the literal text itself, the reference to “wise men of the gentile nations” meant more than just Christian and Muslim scholars. Born in the Castilian town of Medinaceli in 1248, Gikatilla came of age at a time when the debates over the permissibility of Jewish recourse to Greek rationalism raged through Jewish intellectual circles in Spain. These non-­Jewish scholars to whom Gikatilla referred included Aristotle and the other classical philosophers whose work had come to influence Jewish philosophy. Gikatilla meant that, whatever wisdom could be discerned from other scholarly methods or religious traditions, it was only within Judaism that one could encounter the deepest truth. The theology of many kabbalistic texts from this period promoted the idea of a collective Jewish essence, the spirit of the people Israel, infused with the divine sparks emitted at the moment of the creation of the universe. For many thirteenth-­century kabbalists, the purpose of God’s commandments was not the perfection of human society but rather the perfection of the divine realm—of the Godhead—through the restoration of balance that had been lost in the very the act of creation. It is Judaism, manifested in Jewish

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law and ritual observance, that forms the eternal bond between the human and divine realms. For these kabbalists the true function of the Jewish people was in the engagement with the ten sefirot as they emanated from the supernal realm into the natural world. Through proper understanding of the secret wisdom embedded in Jewish tradition, the adept could then bring about a state of harmony in both the upper and lower worlds through intentional thought and religious observance. One Castilian kabbalist, David ben Judah he-­Hasid, articulated this concept in the following way: “Happy are Israel, more than all other people, for the Holy One, blessed be He, desires them and is jealous of them and is glorified by them, for the world was only created for their sake, in order that they might occupy themselves with the Torah to unite this with that. And Israel below in this world is the sustenance of all, and the sustenance of all other peoples. When is this? When they perform the will of their Lord.”13 Such a revolutionary conception of the unique destiny of the Jewish ­people held an obvious attraction for many Jews, giving a fresh importance to seemingly mundane religious practices. Treatises that explained this sort of human engagement with sefirot as the ultimate reason behind the biblical commandments were among the most popular genre of kabbalistic literature of the period. For many of these early kabbalists, the sefirot were thus presented as the knowable and encounterable aspects of God and were contrasted with the concealed and unknowable dimension of God, the Eyn Sof (lit., “without end”). By arguing that there existed a secret, hidden tradition at the heart of Judaism, these scholars were also able to position themselves as guardians of this tradition and thus indispensable religious authorities. Judaism alone held the key for this theurgic interaction between humans and the divine, and it was only a true “master of secrets” (ba’al ha-­sod) who possessed knowledge of Judaism’s esoteric tradition. And if many kabbalists felt that the average Jew was unfit to receive this secret wisdom, others understood that it was the role of the kabbalist to disseminate this information and techniques to the majority of the Jewish people. For the latter, it was impossible to separate the teaching of Torah from the teaching of its inner, kabbalistic wisdom. The question remained, however, how widely this secret wisdom should be disseminated. In response to this problem, most kabbalists of this period fall into two related but distinct groups: those who maintained a conservative position with regard to esoteric knowledge and those who were open to spreading such knowledge more widely.14 The first of these groups followed an approach to Jewish learning that was more traditional, both in Spain and

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throughout the medieval Jewish world. They understood the inner meaning of the Torah, and of all Jewish sacred texts, to be too powerful to be circulated among the Jewish masses. They therefore sought to shield the latter from this hidden, esoteric wisdom and from mystical speculation generally. This first group of kabbalists insisted on limiting their teaching of Judaism’s deeper meaning to oral transmission to a select group of students, and to vague hints and allusions in their written work. One of the original scholars to articulate the need for this conservative approach was Isaac the Blind, the scion of leading rabbinic family in Provence and one of the earliest transmitters of Kabbalah from that region into Catalonia. In a letter to Nahmanides, then the leading Jewish scholar in Spain and an influential kabbalist in his own right, Isaac explained his concern for potential damage that could be done by teaching secret wisdom to those unable to fully comprehend it. “Once something is written, it cannot be concealed anymore, for often it will get lost or the author will die and the letter will pass into the hands of scoffers and idiots, and the name of God is profaned. . . . I have heard from the lands surrounding you, and from the people of Burgos, that they speak publicly in the marketplaces and in the streets in a confused and hasty manner, and from their words it is clear that their hearts have been turned from the All Highest.”15 Isaac’s letter shows us that Jewish scholars in Provence were in close contact with those in Barcelona, and were aware of, and sought to control, the practices of Jews as far away as Burgos. His core message, that popularization of the inner meaning of Judaism is inherently dangerous and could lead to heresy, found a sympathetic ear in Nahmanides. The great sage and communal leader believed that some aspects of Kabbalah could be made explicit, but most of the deepest wisdom of the Torah should remain a closely guarded secret. In his introduction to this Commentary on the Torah, Nahmanides cautioned that his discussion of the Torah, like the sacred text itself, was meant to be understood differently by various strata of readers. He announced that the highest level of understanding, that of Judaism’s hidden tradition, should never be made explicit in such a commentary, but only by direct oral transmission from a teacher to his carefully selected disciples. I bring into a faithful covenant and give proper counsel to all who look into this book not to reason or entertain any thought concerning any of the mystic hints which I write regarding the secrets of the Torah, for I do hereby firmly make known to him [the reader] that my

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words will not be comprehended nor known at all by any reasoning or contemplation excepting from the mouth of a wise kabbalist [speaking] into the ear of an understanding recipient; reasoning about them is foolishness; any unrelated thought brings much damage and withholds the benefit. Let him not believe in an erroneous vanity, because it is only a bad thing which will result from his reasoning.16 Nahmanides felt that most Jews should concentrate on the plain and homiletical meanings of the Torah and leave the kabbalistic wisdom to those who had mystical teachers to guide them directly in such matters. He discouraged people from pursuing kabbalistic insights by way of their own deduction.17 The task of tracing the development of Kabbalah in Spain is thus hampered by the intrinsic secrecy surrounding Jewish mystical learning. Many of the earliest kabbalists in Catalonia purposely cloaked their references to “the tradition” in ambiguity. For years, they produced few texts, and even as full-­ scale treatises and commentaries begin to emerge, they were accompanied by warnings not to disseminate such knowledge. Medieval Jewish authors had long assumed a somewhat dismissive posture with regard to potential detractors, punctuating their works with statements that only the wise would truly understand them. But for kabbalists like Nahmanides and Isaac the Blind, it was of paramount importance to safeguard the hidden essence of the Torah from those unable to comprehend it. But in the late 1260s, Nahmanides would leave Iberia for the Holy Land, never to return. In his absence, the center of kabbalistic study shifted to Castile and toward the second group of scholars who were more open to the dissemination of mystical teaching. The generation of Castilian kabbalists who emerged at the end of the thirteenth century was also more systematic and creative than their Catalonian counterparts. Moses de Leon, Joseph Gikatilla, Joseph of Hamadan, Isaac ibn Sahula, Todros Abulafia, and others produced an outpouring of mystical writings whose impact was felt far beyond the Iberian Peninsula.18 Scholars from as far away as the Rhine Valley (Dan Ashkenazi) and the Levant (Isaac of Acre) found their way to Castile and contributed to the burgeoning centers of kabbalistic study there. Whereas Catalonian Kabbalah seemed to focus on inherited traditions regarding specific sections of the Torah, the Castilian kabbalists sought to develop a fuller mystical hermeneutic that could be applied to the entire cannon in the search for deeper, hidden meaning. Arguing that the goal of salvation was not individual but collective, they concluded that the role of the mystical adept was

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therefore to enlighten all Israel in order that the Jews might fulfill their collective destiny. The mystical teachings of this group were thus circulated more widely, the most impactful of which was the Sefer ha-­Zohar (The Book of Splendor). The Zohar is, in fact, many treatises in one: a combination of various kabbalistic and non-­kabbalistic texts that represents the zenith of Castilian Jewish thought at the close of the century. Although it was widely taken to be an ancient text rediscovered and reproduced by Moses de Leon, the Zohar was written in stages by a series of leading kabbalists of the era and draws on a vast array of Jewish lore. More than any other single work, the Zohar illustrates the breadth and depth of Jewish intellectual creativity during this formative period: the product of a century-­long encounter between religious traditions from Germany, France, Provence, Catalonia, and Castile. It remains the single most influential Jewish text produced in medieval Iberia, exerting a formative impact on Judaism around the world for centuries to come. A great deal of this success can be attributed to its form. Although it appears to have been the product of various Castilian scholars led by Moses de Leon, the Zohar presents itself as an ancient rabbinic text, written in a peculiar form of Aramaic and arranged as a series of imaginative discourses on the standard weekly portions of the Torah. In both its claim to ancient rabbinic provenance and its basic structure, the Zohar is a fundamentally and unapologetically Jewish work, positioning itself in direct opposition to the more universalist postures of contemporary Jewish philosophers. Unlike Nahmanides, for whom Kabbalah was only part of the Jewish exegetical puzzle, and accorded a limited role, the rabbis of the Zohar circle saw Kabbalah as an independent and superior hermeneutic tool.19 Isaac of Acre argued that philosophy, while not invalid, was nonetheless inferior to Kabbalah. He noted that the positive conception of God offered by Jewish mystical tradition was superior to the via negativa of the philosophers. Others, including Isaac ibn Latif, attempted to explain the mystical doctrine of the sefirot in terms of the philosophical concept of the intellects, but this synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Kabbalah ultimately failed. The influences of Muslim Neoplatonic and Sufi texts on early Spanish Kabbalah appear to be marginal, especially when compared to impact of Muslim texts on the development of Jewish philosophy during this same period. Perhaps more important, medieval Jews themselves saw Kabbalah as an inherently Jewish tradition defined by a chain of transmission that was wholly internal to Jewish society and culture. Philosophy, by contrast, was an

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undeniably Greek import. Yet Kabbalah, like other elements of Jewish intellectual culture, had affinities with trends within their host society. While Jewish authors promoted the Kabbalah as an ancient tradition wholly internal to the Jewish experience, their movement coincided with an increased interest in esoteric doctrines within the Hispano-­Christian world as well. In Castile the translation and circulation of texts with esoteric themes was part of the great translation movement and cultural renaissance associated with the court of Alfonso X, a cultural process in which Jewish intellectuals were also involved. Thus rabbis of this period were well aware of works that purported to be ancient sources of hidden wisdom, such as the magical text Picatrix (The Goal of the Wise), or the pseudo-­Aristotelian work Secretum Secretorum (Secret of Secrets), and they produced Hebrew translations of them. Similarly, Jewish discussion of this secret knowledge circulated widely enough for Christian intellectuals to take notice. In Catalonia the great Franciscan scholar and royal tutor Ramon Llull used kabbalistic ideas in his missionary treatises. He attempted to demonstrate that the theory of the sefirot implied the truth of the Trinity.20 Jewish authors were thus aware of parallels and resonances of kabbalistic models within the Christian intellectual world.

From Nahmanides to Solomon ibn Adret In the history of Judaism, the legacy of the Castilian scholars, and of the Zohar in particular, was far greater than that of the more conservative approach to Kabbalah taken by Nahmanides and Solomon ibn Adret. In the immediate history of Hispano-­Jewish life, however, it was the impact of these two great scholars from Catalonia that prevailed. Their legacy was ultimately one of a confluence of opposing religious positions. Nahmanides became a major conduit for the acceptance of Franco-­German religious traditions into Spanish Judaism and was also the first major halakhic scholar to show an acceptance of Kabbalah. He spent much of his long and distinguished career attempting to defend the unity of Jewish society from a series of polemical voices, both from within the Jewish world and without. Despite his own intellectual convictions, he also was acutely aware of the problems posed by the bitter factionalism of his day and took seriously his role as communal leader. This sense of the leadership within the Jewish world was aided by his connection to the Aragonese royal court, a connection that would reinforce his position as a representative of the Jewish community far beyond Barcelona.

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Spiritually, Nahmanides embodied the tense convergence of religious trends that was taking place within Hispano-­Provençal Judaism. Nahmanides grudgingly legitimized the popularity of philosophical study among the Jewish courtiers of his day, arguing that it helped tether them to Jewish belief rather than distance them from it. He expanded the boundaries of exegesis, preserving a respect for scholars such as Alfasi and for an Andalusi style of courtly grace, while eagerly embracing the culture of the French Tosafists and of the emerging trend of Kabbalah.21 Yet socially and politically, Nahmanides was driven by a sense of obligation to keep the Jewish polemics of his day from spinning out of control. His role in these debates was often that of peacemaker. Through the force of his personality, respect for his considerable learning, but also the power derived from being a royal favorite, Nahmanides was able to hold together the combative forces that roiled rabbinic culture from Castile to northern France. Nahmanides’ role as communal leader echoed his conservative stance with regard to Kabbalah. His promotion of certain religious trends and his denunciation or correction of other points of view were delivered in measured tones that aimed at conciliation rather than dominance—a position that was unique for the era. Relatively early in his career, Nahmanides responded to an attack on Maimonidean writings by the leading rabbis of northern France with an open letter that showed respect for and understanding of the French position, while simultaneously defending the honor of Maimonides and his followers. Speaking on behalf of the learned Jews of Catalonia, Nahmanides began with an effusive display of respect to the “lions roaring from their dens,” stating: Rabbis of France, we are your disciples, and we drink your waters. Your words have reached us; let us discuss them. We are not as disputants against them . . . I will make inquiry before your honor. I shall listen for your reasons, after these things, and this loyalty, for I have seen your pure agreed-­upon advice and the signature of your hallowed congregations, all [of whom are] repairers of the breach the governors of the land. . . .

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The entire country of France, its rabbis and princes, the cornerstones of her tribes— all of them have agreed to ban and to excommunicate every man who will lift up his hand to meditate on the Guide for the Perplexed and the Book of Knowledge; his horn will be cut off. And [regarding] he who keeps them, There is one law for him, that he be put to death Until they will be permanently concealed.22 The French rabbis had sought to excommunicate any Jew who studied the Guide for the Perplexed or the first part of the Mishneh Torah, called the Sefer ha-­Madda (Book of Knowledge). Their ban on these two monumental works of Jewish rationalism was among the most serious salvos in the ongoing conflict over philosophy and threatened to divide European Judaism into two exclusive camps. Why did you, saints of the Most High, spread out the net of excommunication over most of the communities [of Israel] You have issued [your decree], Not for the purpose of eliminating The thorns from your vineyard, But rather to cut down The single bunches and clusters [of grapes], [thus] to destroy everything.23 Nahmanides recognized that the divisions that would be caused by the French rabbis’ ban were potentially disastrous and to be avoided at all costs. He was also quick to point out that Maimonides made use of philosophy to bring Jews toward greater appreciation of their sacred heritage, not to undermine it. You have not shown honor to the great Rabbi [Maimonides], who built a tower in the midst of the Talmud, a strong tower for the Name of the Eternal,

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and a Sanctuary for the masses, the unlearned masses who go up into the breaches. He raised up the house of our Talmud, [which had been] a perpetual desolation. Was it for you, majesties of the Talmud, that [Maimonides] wearied himself? [No], he was as one who is compelled and forced to build a boundary to flee thither from the [pursuing] Greek philosophers [and] to be far from Aristotle and Galen.24 The “tower” here is a reference to the Mishneh Torah which, despite the overtly philosophical section known as the Book of Knowledge, was in essence a legal code, and still functioned as a means to aid the Jewish masses in the correct observance of Judaism and thus to avoid causing breaches in the law due to their ignorance. Nahmanides went on to describe Maimonides as a “savior and defender” of Judaism, echoing the latter’s own declaration that he had composed his great law code in response to widespread religious ignorance that had come to plague Jewish society. Whether or not Nahmanides actually believed that the state of Talmudic study and religious observance in the Sephardic world had indeed sunk to such a lowly state is uncertain. His defense of Maimonides’ use of Greek science was that it was employed to reengage those who had abandoned Jewish texts in exchange for philosophical reasoning—the true mark of a communal leader operating in a hostile world. Nahmanides’ letter did not end the infighting among the various factions of Jewish intellectuals of the day. Nonetheless, both his diplomatic tone and general stance that the greatest among the Jewish intelligentsia must value communal unity over discord helped to establish a middle ground that, ultimately, was able to keep these feuding parties from tearing the Jewish world apart. Nahmanides’ call for compromise came at a time when the communities in question were becoming the target of increasing interest and hostility from Christian ecclesiastical institutions. This was an era of reform within the church, and the Jews of Spain and Provence were often pulled into the maelstrom. The Dominican and Franciscan orders were established in the first quarter of the thirteenth century and quickly became a part of religious life in Christian Iberia. Their approach to the Jews was an extension of their principal project, the general reform and evangelization of the greater

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Christian populace. Conversion of the Jews was thus always of secondary importance, and even their public debates with Jews and their sermons delivered to Jewish audiences were ultimately constructed for the benefit of Christian onlookers. Crowds of Christians and even Muslims attended these sermons, sometimes held in churches and sometimes in synagogues. If we recall the uproar caused by Jewish preachers giving public sermons on subjects such as philosophy, which provoked the ire and censure of certain rabbis, we can put these Christian sermons into some context. These public addresses to the Jews usually took the form of harangues meant to prove Jewish obstinacy and waywardness and were by no means an equal exchange of religious interpretations or ideas. The Jews saw these performances as upsetting attacks on their rights and their honor more than as true threats to their faith. That said, Jewish leaders were aware that some conversions had taken place, and that several of these converts had gone on to become ardent polemicists against their former faith. In Paris the efforts of the Jewish convert turned preacher Nicholas Donin led to accusations of blasphemy against the Talmud, and to a papal order that the sacred text be consigned to the flames. Although the call to investigate the Talmud and to destroy it should it be found guilty of blasphemy was generally ignored, France’s Louis IX followed through, and the Talmud was indeed publicly burned in Paris in 1242. Closer to home the Castilian convert Alfonso de Valladolid (formerly Abner of Burgos) posed a more intellectual challenge to Jews who would otherwise dismiss Christian critiques of Judaism as woefully misinformed. Alfonso wrote his anti-­Jewish polemic, Moreh Zedek (Teacher of Righteousness), in Hebrew, using Hebrew sources to argue for the truth of Christianity. If the missionary sermons of the Dominican and Franciscan preachers were aimed mostly at a Christian audience, the Moreh Zedek was harder for Jews to ignore. Another Jewish convert to Christianity who became a thorn in the side of Hispano-­Jewish society was Paul Christiani. Christiani was a Jew living in Montpellier when he appears to have become disillusioned by the various religious debates and controversies among the Jews there. After his conversion he became a student of Raymond of Penyafort, a Dominican friar and canonist from the Catalonian town of Vilafranca del Penedès, who had become royal confessor to Jaume I. Along with fellow Dominican Raymond Martini, Christiani was the driving force behind King Jaume’s decision to hold a public disputation at Barcelona in late July 1263.25 The principal subject of the debate was whether the Talmud acknowledged that the messiah

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had already come, and the principal disputants were Friar Paul and Nahmanides. The latter was reluctant to engage, but his participation was ordered by the king, who presided over the debate itself. The presence of the king, the greatest Jewish scholar of the age, and a learned Jew turned learned friar lent an air of high drama to the event, making it something of a grand public joust. Nevertheless, the ultimate impact for most Jews at the time was minimal. The entire affair lasted for a few days, after which the king paid Nahmanides for his participation in the event, and the latter left without incident. The great rabbi came away without any loss of status or honor as leader of the Jewish community and trusted advisor to the crown. As with the forced sermons and other Christian missionary activity during this period, the public spectacle produced little in the way of Jewish conversion. For the Jews of the Crown of Aragon, the most significant result of the disputation was Nahmanides’ own written version of what took place. In his account of the debate, Nahmanides presents himself as successful in defending core values of Jewish exegesis and theology. This text circulated widely and served as both an extension of the great sage’s larger biblical commentary and as a model for successive generations of Jews who found themselves confronted with an increasingly assertive and polemical strain of Christian preaching. With the emigration of Nahmanides and the death of his cousin, Jonah Gerondi, in the 1260s, Spain remained without a halakhic authority of the first order. This vacuum provided an opening for a more creative group of kabbalists to emerge in Castile. This group flourished brilliantly for a single generation, before the ascent of a new legal expert was able to curtail this innovative activity.26 This was Solomon ibn Adret of Barcelona, a student of Nahmanides, who became the dominant religious force among the Jews of the Crown of Aragon during the late thirteenth century. In an effort to bring this period of rabbinic infighting to a close, Ibn Adret brought his considerable authority to bear in the proclamation of two bans against those practices he and his supporters felt most threatened the stability of Judaism. He placed a more narrowly circulated ban on the study of certain forms of ecstatic Kabbalah that were being promoted by a relatively small group of scholars associated with the iconoclastic mystic Abraham Abulafia, then living in Sicily. Ibn Adret followed his teacher, Nahmanides, in supporting a more closely controlled and circumspect approach to Kabbalah, and hounded Abulafia for seeking, and preaching, a more radical approach to mystical enlightenment.27 The second, and far more significant, decree was a formal ban on the study

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of philosophy and related Greek subjects first issued in the summer of 1305. Speaking on behalf of the sages of Barcelona, Ibn Adret announced: Therefore we decreed and accepted for ourselves and our children, and for all those joining us, that for the next fifty years, under threat of the ban, no man in our community, unless he be twenty-­five years old, shall study, either in the original language or in translation, the books which the Greeks have written on religious philosophy and the natural sciences. It is also forbidden for any member of our community to teach any Jews under twenty-­five years of age any of these sciences lest they drag him away from the law of Israel, which is superior to all these teachings. How can a human being not be afraid to judge between the wisdom of man, who builds by analogy, argument, and guess, and between the wisdom of the Superior Being, between whom and us there is hardly any comparison? Can a human being, who inhabits but a perishable body, think of sitting in judgment on God, who created him, by saying—God forbid—“this He can do, and this He cannot do”? This, certainly, would lead one to complete heresy and from this, indeed, may every student of the Torah be delivered!28 At the heart of Ibn Adret’s ban lies a desire to control religious knowledge, particularly with regard to the potential radicalization of young Jewish students. For some, the public preaching of sermons that employed philosophical themes crossed a line, endangering the spiritual wellbeing of the young and impressionable.29 Ibn Adret’s response to these concerns was less a partisan attack against philosophy per se than a desire to control the dissemination of rationalist ideas. Jewish texts, such as those written by Maimonides, were permitted to be studied at any age. A second ban followed that was in many ways more extensive, but it is not clear that the ban ever really had any reach beyond the community of Barcelona. Ibn Adret eventually pushed for cessation of the hostilities, potentially concerned that the infighting would attract even more unwanted attention from Christian authorities. The ban and its attendant reactions were the culmination of a century of scathing disputes over the nature and limits of Jewish orthodoxy. Ibn Adret’s intervention was less of an attempt to crush Maimonidean rationalism than an effort to reach a compromise between feuding parties. The relatively narrow territorial scope of the ban also reflects the degree to which Hispano-­Provençal

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Judaism, although it formed a broad cultural community, often remained highly localized with regard to actual governance, even in key religious matters. Indeed, even the most respected rabbinic authorities of this period, such as Nahmanides and Ibn Adret, were forced to rely on their personal charisma to get others to reject or enforce bans against various texts. Both recognized that the power to instill these bans rested with the leaders of each individual community over whom they held no direct control. In the eleventh century, Rashi—the greatest Jewish biblical exegete of medieval Europe—composed his landmark commentaries on the Torah and Talmud without seriously engaging either philosophic or kabbalistic trends. Two centuries later such a narrow focus was no longer possible. The cross-­ cultural encounter among French, Provençal, and Iberian Jewish scholars forced anyone who sought to establish a normative reading of sacred texts to consider, defend, or refute the legacies of Maimonidean rationalists on the one hand and the exponents of the Zohar and Catalonian esoteric circles on the other. Seminal rabbinic authorities such as Nahmanides, Solomon ibn Adret, Yom Tov Ishbili, and Jonah Girondi each attempted to synthesize elements of these distinct traditions. Even the great Toledan sage Meir Abulafia, a defender of an older, more narrowly defined halakhic tradition, was forced to engage both rationalism and Kabbalah in his efforts to curtail their growing influences on the standard Jewish curriculum. Abulafia was the leading rabbinic authority in Castile during the first half of the thirteenth century, and greatly aided the integration of Tosafist learning into Spain, but only as an expansion of the traditional Andalusi approach to halakhah, and never as its substitute.30 This tendency toward inclusion, even amid intense conflict, remained a hallmark of Sephardic Judaism in large part due to the charismatic authority of men like Abulafia, Nahmanides, and Ibn Adret. By the close of the thirteenth century, the greatest period of religious ferment and creativity that Spanish Jews had witnessed in centuries was coming to an end. Many of the central factors that had sustained the controversies remained unresolved and would surface again from time to time in succeeding decades. But these later phases of the Maimonidean controversy never quite attained the same virulence, nor prompted the level of creativity, achieved in the thirteenth century. Ibn Adret died in 1310, five years after the great German rabbi Asher ben Yehiel arrived in Toledo. Asher had fled persecution in Cologne and, with the backing of Ibn Adret, was promptly recognized as the leading halakhic authority in Castile. The establishment of this Ashkenazi rabbinic dynasty at Toledo was the last major step in the

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successful confluence of Franco-­German and Andalusi religious traditions. It was Asher’s sons, especially Jacob, who effectively integrated the halakhic traditions of his ancestral culture in Germany with those of his adopted home of Castile in a landmark legal code, the Arba’ah Turim (The Four Rows). As had been the case with the appearance of the Mishneh Torah over a century earlier, the Arba’ah Turim found a ready audience among scholars and educated laymen alike. The acceptance of this work may be seen as marking the ultimate triumph of religious and legal integration over the more polemical forces that once threatened to tear Spanish and Provençal Judaism apart.

The Jewish Aljama in the Thirteenth Century The breadth and intensity of the debates over philosophy and Kabbalah loomed so large in the minds of Hispano-­Jewish writers of the thirteenth century that it is easy to assume that these concerns engulfed all of Jewish society. Such an interpretation overemphasizes the impact of intellectual life. Even as the great rabbis issued bans and counter-­bans against one another, the vast majority of the Jews in their communities went about their daily lives with little interest in or awareness of the scholarly debates that raged around them. The thirteenth century was also a period of consolidation of the Jewish aljama, helping to give structure to the Jewish community and setting it apart from the surrounding Christian town while still giving it the political mechanism to integrate into the life of the town. As with the Christian municipal councils, or concejos, the aljamas were independent from one another, coming together infrequently to form a united front toward the accomplishment of particular goals, usually fiscal or legislative. As the political structure of the Jewish communities developed, and as new Jewish settlements proliferated and grew, this also meant the rise or expansion of Jewish oligarchies. Throughout Christian Iberia, Jews were granted official permission to build new synagogues, against longstanding ecclesiastical policy, and were generally left alone to manage their own affairs. Small numbers of great families continued to form the governing ranks of local Jewish communities, and sometimes a particularly powerful or influential individual might rise above the rest with the backing of Christian authorities.31 In Galicia, Christian authorities recognized a certain Isaac Ishmael as the headman or “chief Jew” of his community, and a similar position is sometimes listed for the Jews of Saragossa.32 Still, rule by a cohort of prominent families remained the

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norm, at least in larger Jewish centers, and those in power regularly sought to limit access to their community’s governing council. Contemporary rabbinic literature held that the governance of each Jewish community should be entrusted only to scholars well versed in halakhah. The reality, however, generally fell far short of this ideal. Regarding the annual selection of judges by the Jews of Córdoba, the thirteenth-­century poet Todros ben Judah Abulafia quipped that their approach was like selecting “herders of cattle.”33 The independent aljama, which was the standard structure of Jewish political organization in medieval Iberia, was essentially a loose association of extended families, intellectual circles, and other social groups. Internal divisions posed perennial challenges to Jewish communal authority that were as great or greater than those from the external, Christian world. While Jews generally respected their legal traditions and authorities, such respect did not preclude them from bending Jewish law and challenging communal authorities when it served their personal interests. Jews went to the king to demand justice and protection from the abuses of their own communal councils (kehalim; sing. kahal), and the leadership of the aljamas countered with similar appeals for royal support. In most cases, the king favored the kehalim, often empowering them to impose whatever penalties necessary to force recalcitrant Jews to fall in line. In some instances, however, smaller factions within the Jewish community did succeed in winning royal defense against their kahal. The lack of a fixed royal policy in this regard promoted regular appeals to royal intervention by various sectors of Jewish society.34 The expansion of Jewish involvement in royal service, particularly in the field of tax farming, but also in diplomatic, medical, and other capacities, created a larger group of Jewish courtiers than ever before. This development does not mean, as many of their detractors asserted, that Jews dominated the royal administration and bent kings to their will. Rather, the amplification of overall numbers of Jews in the service of the royal court and other great lords, both secular and ecclesiastical, had its most significant impact on the Jewish community. First and foremost, it created an entire tier of Jewish society where previously there had existed only a small handful of Jewish grandees. This new stratum regularly challenged the burgeoning power of the local aljamas and their governing councils. In some of the larger Jewish communities, these courtiers, sometimes referred to as “judíos francos” or “exempt Jews,” were closely tied to the oligarchies that governed the aljama. In this way, the rivalries between the local kahal and the men of the court were complicated and could break into rivalries between powerful Jewish

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clans. Elsewhere, however, local governing councils had no direct ties to these courtiers and did not seek their help or intercession. The second way in which the expansion of Jewish involvement in royal administration came to shape the lives of other Jews was in their unfortunate association in the minds of so many Christians, erroneous though it may have been, with royal corruption and oppression. Although Jewish power at the royal court was limited, and local Jewish councils often fought against the influence of these courtiers in local Jewish politics, the perception of a unified Jewish front working to erode Christian rights and infringe on Christian authorities increased steadily over the course of the thirteenth century. It was one of the bitter ironies of the era that the acrimonious Jewish internecine conflicts were so thoroughly ignored by their Christian neighbors, who held fast to an image of Jews as an undifferentiated monolith bent on undermining Christian society. In smaller Jewish settlements, maintaining basic financial viability was often a greater communal concern than political inclusivity or the intellectual training of civic leaders. In Zamora, a medium-­size town with the largest Jewish community in the region, the Jews had difficulty meeting their tax obligations. In 1210 and again in 1258, they were granted a tax break by the local cathedral for not having enough to pay their regular amount.35 In this instance, the Jews’ financial difficulties do not appear to have been from unfair taxation policies, diminished status, or competition from the local concejo. Rather, it was an example of the economic difficulties that even a medium-­size community could face, and one that echoed the problems of many smaller Christian and Muslim communities at the time. This grim reality is often lost when we consider only larger and more intellectually significant Jewish centers. Over the course of the thirteenth century, Jews were geographically mobile and sought work and settlement in nearly every corner of Christian Iberia. The vast majority of their settlements remained quite small. The Jews who established the community of Vic, in Catalonia, generally came from nearby larger communities such as Girona and Barcelona. After settling in Vic, some then continued to fan out into other smaller towns in the region, while others would leave Vic for months or years at a time and then return. At no time during this period did the local Jewish population of Vic exceed more than a few dozen, a situation that appears to have been quite normal for many Jewish communities of this period.36 We have documentation of Jewish merchants scratching out a living in small towns in Catalonia such

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as Peralada and Figueres, often without the formal institutions of a Jewish aljama.37 In the early fourteenth century, they received settlement privileges similar to those granted to Jews willing to populate the lands conquered from the Muslims in the previous century. They moved among these small towns and larger ones, like Castelló d’Empúries. In the region of Extremadura in western Castile, the Jews of Miranda de Castañar were a similar small community, some of whom were nonetheless quite wealthy and educated.38 The difficult lives of those who moved between these smaller settlements, hoping to carve out a living for themselves and their families, were perhaps more typical of the Jewish experience in the thirteenth century than that of the economic and scholarly elites of Barcelona and Toledo. Toledo was, in many ways, a culturally Andalusi city under Christian rule. As we have seen, educated Jews there continued to write in Arabic, compose Hebrew poetry in the Andalusian style, and promote family lineages with roots in Córdoba and Granada. Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Toledo remained the most important Jewish center in Castile, if not all of Christian Iberia. And yet the brilliance of Toledan Jewry should not blind us to the many other Jewish communities of the age that, while perhaps humbler, were nonetheless home to the majority of the kingdom’s Jews. There is little evidence that the Jews in and around towns like Zamora, Salamanca, Ourense, or Burgos were connected to the culture of al-­Andalus, either with regard to the Arabic language or the intricate intellectual curriculum developed during the Sephardic golden age. Even the relatively large Jewish communities at this time were still quite small. For example, the Jews of Burgos represented one of the largest communities in Castile during the thirteenth century, but numbered only about 150 families, perhaps 10 percent of the city’s total population.39 Wherever they lived Jews were firmly integrated into the social, economic, and political landscape of their surrounding society. Jews spoke the Romance vernacular in its proto-­Castilian, Navarro-­Aragonese, Catalan, and Occitan variants, and most Jewish men could read Hebrew. Some (merchants, lenders, scholars, and scribes) could also write Hebrew, while a far smaller number could write in Arabic or Latin (both in Hebrew characters). Although they maintained their own legal and political institutions, Jews also continued to engage with their Christian and Muslim neighbors in a variety of ways. Perhaps most notable at this time was the role Christian notaries played as a mainstay of Jewish business and personal life. In the Crown of Aragon, notaries had become a common fixture of society by the thirteenth

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century, indispensable to the effective administration of urban economies. They were used by nearly all levels of society to draft wills, marriage contracts, loans, and real estate or rental contracts. As Jews became more firmly integrated into the institutional world of the Christian town, they came to prefer Christian notaries in their business dealings with Christians. Not only were these notaries often cheaper and more convenient than Jewish scribes, but the documents they drew up were more effective means of collecting from Christian debtors. Jewish communal scribes (sofrei ha-­kahal) issued legal deeds to demonstrate sales of property, as well as acknowledgments of legal responsibilities of various kinds; they competed with Christian notaries for Jewish business. Rabbis resented this blurring of the communities, especially with regard to matters that fell within the jurisdiction of Jewish law. But their fellow Jews generally saw no problem with Christian notaries, whom they used as often as Jewish scribes, if not more so. Ultimately, rabbinic authorities had no choice but to accept the situation as a social reality and recognize the limits of Jewish legal control over what Jews did. Under King Jaume I, the use of Christian notaries in any business that might involve Christians became mandatory. In addition to loans and other business contracts between Jews and Christians, this also could include Jewish marriage or inheritance payments that involved debts or properties involving Christians.40 There was no true parallel to this notarial culture in Castile, where public scribes were fixtures within municipal administrations and often owed their position to royal support.41 Nonetheless, Castilian Jews engaged with their Christian neighbors and their institutions both economically and socially, forming an important part of urban life.

Jewish Status in the Thirteenth Century We find the same complexities that determined the Jews’ status and their general relationship to the Muslim majority in al-­Andalus at play in their relationship with Christian societies of Castile, the Crown of Aragon and Navarre. As noted in the previous chapter, Jewish status in Christian Iberia was governed by a mix of Christian religious ideology and political and economic need. Within this framework, Jewish leaders negotiated with the crown to secure Jewish communal autonomy and security. This basic modus vivendi continued during the thirteenth century, pitting Jewish economic utility to the crown against a rising tide of Christian religious zeal and

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socioeconomic competition. The result was that royal protection of the Jews, though often stout, was increasingly challenged in a variety of ways. In times of political chaos, when royal or baronial protection was weak or unavailable, Jews found themselves at the mercy of a populace in which anti-­Jewish hostility was widespread. During the central decades of the thirteenth century, the crown attempted to make law what most kings and Jews, if not all others, already regarded as the de facto situation in Castile: that Jews belonged to the king, regardless of where they lived. In an early attempt to establish this concept as law throughout the realm, the Libro de Fueros de Castilla stated: “The Jews belong to the king; although they might be under the power of nobles or with their knights or with other men or under the power of monasteries, all should belong to the king under his protection and for his service.”42 The Fueros de Castilla can be seen as part of a longstanding attempt by the crown, and by Alfonso X in particular, to establish a kingdomwide legal system. Other compilations, including the Fuero Real, the Siete Partidas, and the Espéculo, also began to shape Jewish life in the kingdom. In these new royal law codes, the Jewish voice that could be detected in many of the earlier fueros receded. It was replaced by a more forceful articulation of royal sovereignty and by language that echoed the church’s recent push to separate and restrict Jewish minorities throughout Europe. Both of these shifts within royal legislation signaled important changes in the Jews’ place within Hispano-­Christian society. For the most part Castilian Jews were not concerned about the crown’s overt assertion of royal control over them. They continued to view the monarchy as the most dependable defense against the ecclesiastical and popular hostilities that they accepted as part and parcel of interfaith relations of the day. An unfortunate consequence of the crown’s increasingly explicit claims to direct sovereignty over the Jews was the attendant increase in popular jealousy and anger on the part of many Christians. Indeed, the other estates did not view royal declarations of natural lordship over all Jews (and Muslims) as legal recognition of facts on the ground but as part of the disconcerting efforts of the crown to extend its jurisdiction over an ever-­wider area. To be sure, other barons successfully asserted sovereignty over the Jews in their territories, sometimes with the acknowledgment of the crown. Yet such exceptions to the stated rule did little to change the Jews’ image as royal favorites and lackeys. Whatever the reality, popular perception was that the Jews were tools of the crown if not, in fact, its puppet-­masters. It was during this period that “Jew” became a synonym for “devious counselor,” and all royal advisors of various

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religious backgrounds were uniformly condemned as “Jewish.” While this negative association between perfidious courtiers and Jews was, ultimately, a means of political criticism against the crown, it was nonetheless damaging for the reputation and image of all Jews, not merely those in royal service. From the point of view of various Christian factions, royal privileges given to the Jews put Christians at a disadvantage. Prominent Jews were often exempted from paying taxes, and all Jews were generally excused from paying the standard tithe to the church on lands they acquired, a benefit Christians did not enjoy. But practical concerns and resentments were only part of the problem. The Jews’ status in Christian Iberia had always blended their perceived benefit to the crown with broader notions of social marginalization based on their religion. Indeed, although many were able to obtain exemptions, Jews were expected to pay thirty silver dineros to their local church parish in recognition of the thirty pieces of silver that Judas received in exchange for his betrayal of Jesus. Failure to do so prompted claims of moral impropriety, not jealousy. Jewish-­Christian tensions intensified over the course of the thirteenth century as new social and economic concerns over the Jews’ status blended with calls for religious reform. Perhaps most notably, the relationships among Christian debtors, Jewish lenders, and the crown proved a source of competition and hostility throughout this period. Credit had become a fixture of the medieval Spanish economy, as both Jews and Christians lent money at interest, but the collection of debts was fraught with problems. The crown supported the repayment of debts, especially to Jewish lenders, who were vassals of the royal treasury. However, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 had opened a loophole for Christian debtors, arguing that no lender should charge “oppressive and excessive” interest. The result was that debtors claiming usury sued lenders in ecclesiastical courts, rather than in royal courts, while creditors generally chose the opposite venue. Thus Christian resistance to the repayment of Jewish debts contained both religious and political dimensions, as well as the more obvious financial motives. Jewish lending was seen, not inaccurately, as an extension of royal power. Collectively, the Jews were one of the primary financial means of support for the crown in its various military endeavors and designs for political expansion. The more that Jewish lenders collected from Christian debtors, the more the crown could collect from the Jews. By asserting direct and, for the most part, sole control over Jewish taxes, the crown had a steady and oft-­used source of liquid capital to fund its many projects.43 The count-­kings

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of Catalonia-­Aragon also made extensive use of loans from Jewish bankers. Jaume II borrowed heavily from his Jewish subjects to finance his costly military campaign against Almería in 1309 and collected the enormous sum of 500,000 solidi from the Jews of his realm to fund the conquest of Sardinia. Royal policy was generally to attract Jewish settlement, and to use Jewish labor, loyalty, and taxes and loans as key support for royal projects and a bulwark against the power of the aristocracy and the towns. This policy, in turn, exacerbated tensions between the Jews and the other estates, a dynamic reminiscent of the one that had shaped Jewish-­Muslim relations in al-­Andalus. Legal and political battles involving the crown, the municipal concejos, and the Jews came to define Jewish-­Christian relations during this period. The concejo of Burgos sought to stop appointment of alcaldes apartados— special royal judges for cases involving Jews—because they argued that such appointments favored Jews in collecting debts from Christians. The Jews, in turn, complained to the king that they were being forced to pay for joint judges with the concejo. Alfonso X initially backed the Jews, but eventually the concejo won. Nonetheless, the conflict over the use of alcaldes apartados would prove to be among the more intransigent problems of Jewish-­Christian relations in medieval Castile. At nearly every meeting of the Cortes over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Christian representatives lodged complaints against the continued use of alcaldes apartados, and a succession of kings agreed to abolish them. A similar point of conflict was the crown’s use of Jews as tax-­collectors, and Christians regularly attempted to use the Cortes as a means of excluding the Jews form these posts. At the Cortes of Haro in 1288, the various Christian representatives demanded that the lucrative practice of tax-­gathering be reserved for the urban nobility, the so-­called good men of the towns.44 In the minds of most Christians of the era, the municipal concejo was pitted against the king’s “Jews,” a category that conflated royal agents with the leaders of the local aljama even though the two groups rarely worked together and were often at odds with one another in financial matters. The backbone of the Castilian concejos was the caballeros villanos, a rising class of urban non-­noble knights who formed oligarchies in several key Castilian cities during the thirteenth century. Like the Jews, these knights also received privileges and tax exemptions from the crown, who hoped to use them as a bulwark against the power of the landed nobility. As such, they too drew the ire of the urban populace, which they in turn sought to redirect toward the Jews. The caballeros villanos were counterparts to, and rivals of,

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the great Jewish families who sought similar dominance within the Jewish aljamas that were evolving at this time. The rising Christian urban oligarchy saw their Jewish neighbors as unwanted competition in the fields of trade, tax-­collecting, and moneylending, intensifying religious frictions between the Christians and Jews as the concejos and the aljamas competed with one another for royal privileges, exemptions, and positions of authority. Despite these mounting tensions, Castilian Jews generally flourished through most of the long reign of Alfonso X. Unfortunately, the last years of his rule were as disastrous for Castilian Jewry as the preceding decades had been beneficial. The king’s monetary demands of the Jews set a disturbing precedent for the capricious and exacting fiscal policies of several Iberian monarchs over the next two centuries. This collapse of royal support was underscored by the fall from grace and execution of one of Alfonso’s leading Jewish courtiers, Don Isaac (Zag) de la Maleha. By the late 1270s, the aging and ailing Alfonso was dealing with a persistent fiscal crisis and a rebellion of the nobility led by his own son, Sancho. Don Zag, who had emerged as the crown’s leading treasurer and tax-­gatherer, eventually found himself embroiled in these intrigues. In 1278 Alfonso charged Don Zag with delivering a large sum of money to the Castilian forces besieging the Muslim stronghold of Algeciras, but the Infante Sancho was able to divert the funds to his own cause: the return of his mother, Queen Violante, from exile in Aragon. The siege collapsed, and in June 1280 the knights of Santiago were decimated at Moclín. Enraged, Alfonso had Zag de la Maleha taken to Sancho’s residence in Seville, and from there, dragged through the streets and executed. But the grim sentence against his once-­trusted courtier was not enough to assuage the king’s feelings of betrayal, and he turned his fury on his Jewish subjects. In January of 1281, Alfonso ordered that all the Jews of his kingdom be imprisoned in their synagogues and forced to pay the massive amount of 12,000 gold maravedíes per day, or 4,380,000 annually, to ransom themselves.45 The turbulent final years of Alfonso’s reign forcefully reiterated the precarious nature of Jewish life in medieval Iberia, and the degree to which the fate of all Jews was often bound up with that of the most prominent members of their society. The increasing turbulence of Christian-­Jewish relations and the intersecting needs of the various sectors of each society led to the articulation of provocative, and often contradictory, statements with regard to the Jews. The landmark literary and legal works emanating from the famous court of Alfonso X, known as “El Sabio” (“The Wise”), help illustrate this situation.

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Alfonso’s own ambivalence with regard to the Jews, and his need to address the position of the church and his Christian subjects, are particularly notable in his great legal code, Las Siete Partidas. The Partidas was the culmination of Alfonso’s attempt to standardize Castilian law based on Roman imperial tradition, including the classification of the Jews as a legal religion. Yet ­Alfonso’s code also highlights the increasingly precarious nature of Jewish life at a time when the spirit of Christian reform that had swept over much of Europe began to be seen in Spain. Examples of harsh language and restrictive measures abound in the Partidas, reflecting both the older Roman and Visigothic legal texts on which much of Alfonsine legislation is based as well as the more recent ecclesiastical position that had been articulated with renewed force since the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Although it would not be put into effect until the following century, the Partidas still contains echoes of the era in which it was composed, offering a window into the world of Christian-­ Jewish relations in thirteenth-­century Castile. As with the social subordination of Jews under Muslim rule, many of the restrictions on Jewish status, power, and social mobility in the Siete Partidas would have been expected by contemporary Jews. Such prohibitions were standard throughout Christendom, and, as with many of the dhimmi regulations, were also frequently ignored by secular and ecclesiastical lords alike. Indeed, Alfonso X himself employed Jews within the royal administration, as did Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo and one of the most powerful churchmen in thirteenth-­century Castile.46 Perhaps more striking were the relatively positive statements regarding the Jews and Judaism found throughout section 7 of the Partidas which seem to run counter to the vitriol that was standard in most ecclesiastical and secular statements regarding Jews elsewhere in Europe. Alfonso’s dedicated title 24 of the seventh division, or partida, to legislation concerning the Jews. Law 1 of this section is entitled “What the Word Jew Means and Whence This Term Is Derived,” and it opens with the following definition: “A party who believes in, and adheres to, the law of Moses is called a Jew, according to the strict signification of the term, as well as one who is circumcised, and who observes the other precepts commanded by his religion. This name is derived from the tribe of Judah which was nobler and more powerful than the others, and, also possessed another advantage, because the king of the Jews had to be selected from that tribe, and its members always received the first wounds in battle.”47 Here Alfonso offers one of the most succinct and well-­informed statements regarding Jewish identity in the premodern world. His recognition of

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the various facets of Judaism is accurate, even laudatory, and notably free of religious polemic or enmity. To be sure, this section ends with a restatement of the old Augustinian argument that Jews were allowed to live among Christians because they accepted a servile position and acted as living reminders “that they were descended from those who crucified Our Lord Jesus Christ.”48 Yet even this negative sentiment carries with it a relatively favorable characterization when applied to Castile’s contemporary Jewish community. Indeed, both theological worldview and practical concerns led the many Spanish kings of this era to see the Jews in a somewhat more favorable light than their Muslim subjects. They recognized the biblical legacy shared between Jews and Christians, as well as the Jews’ position as noncombatants who openly accepted Christian dominance. While this was a longstanding modus vivendi throughout Christendom, accepted, as Alfonso notes, by “church, emperors, kings and princes,” it was of particular importance in Iberia as Christian military expansion reached its zenith.49 The Partidas was composed in the wake of Castile’s conquest of Córdoba (1236) and Seville (1248), and of the subsequent rebellion of several Andalusian towns that had formerly submitted to Alfonso’s father, Fernando III. The difficult incorporation of these new Muslim populations and the persistent fear of armed revolt were problems Alfonso did not have to face from the kingdom’s Jewish population. The king’s relatively benign attitude toward the Jews extended to his discussion titled “How Jews Can Have a Synagogue Among Christians” in Law  4. Here Alfonso undercuts the established prohibition against the building or renovation of synagogues with the qualifying statement “except by our order.” Moreover, he not only protects Jewish rights to worship but also recognizes the inherent sanctity of Jewish devotion: “And for the reason that a synagogue is a place where the name of God is praised, we forbid any Christian to deface it, or remove anything from it, or take anything out of it by force; except where some malefactor takes refuge there. . . Moreover, we forbid Christians to put any animal in a synagogue, or loiter in it, or place any hindrance in the way of the Jews while they are there performing their devotions according to their religion.”50 Alfonso’s characterization of synagogues as holy places in which Jews praise the name of God stands in stark contrast to anti-­Jewish sentiment prevalent elsewhere in thirteenth-­century Europe. And yet the rest of Law 4 suggests that this same antagonism had begun to take root in Castile as well. It appears to reflect a social reality in which Jews could be harassed and their houses of worship desecrated by

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Christians who took it on themselves to enforce Jewish marginalization in crude and violent ways. This combination of royal support for Jewish religious life and popular Christian hostility was widespread. When the small settlement of Jews in the Catalan town of Vic acquired a courtyard to build a synagogue in 1277, they ran into a protest by the local archdeacon, Ramon de Maserata. The archdeacon attempted to stop construction, considering it scandalous to have a Jewish house of worship so close to the town’s cathedral, but his efforts only resulted in a delay.51 Throughout the Spanish kingdoms, Christians marked religious boundaries through ritualized forms of aggression, most notably associated with their celebration of Semana Santa (Holy Week) every spring. On Good Friday it was typical for young boys, and at times others, to throw rocks at the Jews, their houses, and their tombstones in an expression of religious vengeance and cultural domination. By the thirteenth century the association of living Jews with those whom the Christians understood to have betrayed Jesus had also given rise to rumors that Jews sacrificed Christian children on Good Friday because their enmity toward Christ compelled them to reenact the Crucifixion. In Law 2 of Title 24, Alfonso offers the following warning: And because we have heard it said that in some places, the Jews cele­ brated and still celebrate Good Friday, commemorating the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, by way of contempt: stealing children and fastening them to crosses, and making images of wax and crucifying them, when they cannot obtain children; we order that, hereafter, if in any part of our dominions anything like this is done, and can be proved, all persons who were present when the act was committed shall be seized, arrested and brought before the king; and after the king ascertains that they are guilty, he shall cause them to be put to death in a disgraceful manner, no matter how many there may be. We also forbid any Jew to dare to leave his house or his quarter on Good Friday, but they must all remain shut up until Saturday morning, and if they violate this regulation we decree that they shall not be entitled to reparation for any injury or dishonor inflicted upon them by Christians.52 Alfonso’s allusion to Jewish ritual murder is one of the first recorded references to this calumny in Iberia. While the king’s response to these rumors reflects an awareness that they are baseless and a clear dedication to stop mob

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violence against Jews through the assertion of royal power, his efforts to safeguard Jewish rights nonetheless signals the increased need for such control. Such public assertion of Jewish inferiority became popular beyond Castile, and even beyond the Christian community. In some parts of Christian Iberia, there is also evidence of Muslim participation in Holy Week violence against Jews. This seemingly odd phenomenon suggests a Muslim desire to punish Jews for rejecting Jesus, revered as a prophet in Islam, and for allegedly dishonoring him through committing mock crucifixions. Yet such attacks against Jews also functioned as a means for Muslims to assert their own social standing within a Christian-­dominated society, much as it did for their Christian counterparts.53 The conclusion of Law 2, which forbids Jews to leave their homes on Good Friday, is a clear acknowledgment of the legislation that had been established by the papacy at the Fourth Lateran Council regarding the Jews, which states: “Moreover, during the last three days before Easter and especially on Good Friday, they shall not go forth in public at all, for the reason that some of them on these very days, as we hear, do not blush to go forth better dressed and are not afraid to mock the Christians who maintain the memory of the most holy Passion by wearing signs of mourning.”54 However, Alfonso’s treatment of this law appears to be more interested in keeping the peace than in punishing his Jewish subjects. He does not blame the Jews for provocation, and restricts them to their homes for one day, not three. Moreover, his warning also serves to reinforce the judicial norm in which Jews could claim damages against the Christians for attacks on themselves or their property. Alfonso’s willingness to protect Jewish rights and the inference of what would happen without such royal support can also be seen in Law 5 regarding legal compulsion and Jewish Sabbath observance. It states: Saturday is the day on which Jews perform their devotions, and remain quiet in their lodgings, and do not make contracts or transact any business; and for the reason that they are obliged by their religion to keep it, no one should on that day summon them or bring them into court. Wherefor we order that no judge shall employ force or any constraint upon Jews on Saturday in order to bring them into court on account of their debts; or arrest them; or cause them any other annoyance, for the remaining days of the week are sufficient for the purpose of employing compulsion against them.55

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This section of the law is a confirmation of protections offered in many of the royal fueros granted to Jews over the previous century and a half. It alludes to Jewish concerns over their ability to interact with Christians and live within a Christian social and legal framework without abandoning the fundamental dictates of Judaism.56 Alfonso follows his regulation of judicial procedure regarding the Jews with a warning against any extrajudicial vigilantism: “And in addition to this, we forbid any Christian, on his own responsibility, to arrest or wrong any Jew either in person or property, but where he has any complaint against him he must bring it before our judges; and if anyone should be so bold as to use violence against the Jews, or rob them of anything, he shall return them double the value of the same.”57 Still, the relations between Jews and Christians as reflected in the Partidas were not unremittingly grim. Law 8, which prohibits Christians from living with Jews, seems to suggest a social reality in which at least some Jews and Christians openly socialized with one another. We forbid any Jew to keep Christian men or women in his house, to be served by them; although he may have them to cultivate and take care of his lands or protect him on the way when he is compelled to go to some dangerous place. Moreover, we forbid any Christian man or woman to invite a Jew or Jewess, or to accept an invitation from them, to eat or drink together or to drink any wine made by their hands. We also order that no Jews shall dare to bathe in company with Christians, and that no Christian shall take any medicine or cathartic made by a Jew; but he can take it by the advice of some intelligent person, only where it is made by a Christian, who knows and is familiar with its ingredients.58 The last of the laws in the section “On the Jews” required them to wear distinguishing marks to avoid the “many crimes and outrageous things [that] occur between Christians and Jews because they live together in cities, and dress alike.”59 Here too, the Partidas reflect the ambiguity of Jewish-­Christian relations during this period. It is doubtful that the unspecified “outrages” that took place between Christians and Jews stemmed from Christian inability to properly identify Jews, considering that the cities in which the two groups lived in close proximity were indeed quite small. The Partidas were echoing canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council, which had stated: “Jews and

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Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress.”60 Yet while the Spanish church, and to some degree the leaders of the Jewish communities, sought to maintain a degree of social separation between members of the different religions, those who blurred those boundaries did not seem to have done so out of ignorance.61 By and large Christians knew the Jews with whom they interacted. The law thus suggests a world in which some sought to limit cross-­communal interactions of various sorts, while others pursued it. Efforts to mark the Jews were part of a larger program of sumptuary legislation aimed at regulating social classes, status, and honor in Castilian society. And, as with much of the restrictive statutes of the period, this law was routinely ignored by Alfonso and most of his successors. Nonetheless, its inclusion here marks its first appearance in Castilian legislation, and is thus something of a turning point in the expected position of Jews in that society. The notions that certain clothing and fabrics were reserved for Christians, and that the Jews’ lower social status should be made manifest not only in their physical appearance but in all of their relationships with Christians, were now more clearly set as uniform expectations throughout Hispano-­Christian society. Royal exemptions to these rules served to fuel public outrage, much as they had in Hispano-­Muslim society. Widespread public support for such measures was repeated in nearly every meeting of Castile’s representative assemblies (the Cortes), as well as all major ecclesiastical councils in both Castile and the Crown of Aragon throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. At the same time that Alfonso was drawing up the Siete Partidas, his father-­in-­law, Jaume I of Aragon, sought to assert royal authority through the establishment of a similar legal code, the Furs of Valencia. The Furs called for the separation of Jews from Christians, including prohibiting Jews from having Christian wet nurses or servants, but like the Partidas, they placed the enforcement of these regulations firmly within the sole jurisdiction of the crown. The royal charter was only operative for the newly conquered Kingdom of Valencia but nonetheless provoked a sharp reaction from the aristocracy and municipalities throughout the Crown of Aragon, who demanded royal recognition of their own ancient customs and privileges. There was a similar push by the leaders of the city of Perpignan, which Jaume had made the mainland capital of another one of his territories, the Kingdom of Mallorca, in 1276. The town fathers had already been successful

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in asserting their own rights against the encroachment of Aragonese royal power, and the associated privileges that the crown often granted to its Jewish subjects. In 1243 the charter granted to Perpignan declared that “the Jews have no privilege against the men of Perpignan through any concession made to them or in any other way.”62 Throughout the Spanish kingdoms, then, the Jews became enmeshed in this larger political battle, seeking to defend their rights against a church that saw them as social inferiors due to their rejection of the Christian faith, and towns and nobles who viewed the Jews’ protected status as a blow to their own honor and authority. As with royal ambivalence toward Jewish status, the response by the other estates could also be complex. Their rejection of royal sovereignty over the Jews and the privileges it often entailed did not, necessarily, lead to a rejection of the Jews’ presence. In Perpignan the same charter that required the Jews to assume a subordinate social and political position vis-­à-­vis Christian townsmen simultaneously compelled local Jews to restrict their business transactions to the city limits in order that they might better benefit the municipality. Similarly, there was also a movement of Jews to baronial and ecclesiastical lands in the thirteenth century, in large part due to enticements that were given so that these other estates might also benefit from Jewish economic and civic contributions.63 The intensification of Christian fear of the “judaizing” of Christian society, and of royal political power in particular, does not mean that any sector of Christian society was actually controlled by Jews. Christians continued to dominate the royal administrations of Castile, Navarre, and the Crown of Aragon as they did other key sectors of the economy, such as long-­distance trade. Moreover, while Jews were prominent in the royal administration of several kings, they were never dominant. The one notable exception here is the role played by Jews in the service of Jaume I of Aragon. Yet even in this case, the predominance of Jews in royal service was mostly with regard to the Kingdom of Valencia, not all of the Crown of Aragon, and even this limited influence was relatively short-­lived. Determined to extend royal power against the resistance of the other lords of the realm, Jaume was against allowing rival nobles from either Aragon or Catalonia to benefit from the acquisition of Valencia, and thus declared that it would remain a separate kingdom within the federated Crown of Aragon. He and his successors likewise developed a royal administration for this new kingdom that was dominated by Jews who, as a population, remained primarily allied to the crown, not to the Aragonese or Catalonian aristocracy, nor to the majority Muslim population that rose up in several rebellions

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against their new Christian overlords. Under Jaume’s son, Pere III (r. 1276– 85), and grandson, Jaume II (1291–1327), the use of Jews in the administration of the Crown of Aragon reached its height. At first Pere III attempted to exclude both the nobility and the towns from the public administration of the Crown of Aragon, relying almost exclusively on Jewish functionaries who were wholly dependent on, and thus loyal to, the crown. His efforts met with stiff opposition, and in 1283 a united nobility known as the “Union” forced Pere to relent. The results of the Union revolt included the royal guarantee of greater inclusion of nobility in public service, and the subsequent dismissal of all Jews. In a move that would become a pattern of royal behavior over the next two centuries in both Aragon and Castile, the king’s promise to the Union was little more than a temporary ploy meant to mollify them and buy time. Royal employment of Jewish tax-­collectors, physicians, diplomats, and advisors would continue. But royal commitment to using Jewish elites as a tool for the extension of royal authority would henceforth be viewed as a broken promise and have important repercussions for the wider Jewish community. As in Castile, Jews in the royal administration of the Crown of Aragon came to be seen as usurpers of the privileges of Christian aristocracy and the new class of urban patricians, and of the social status and honors that went with such positions. That the honor and authority that was the birthright of these Christian lords and knights was being given to Jews, or so they argued, was doubly upsetting. Nor were such concerns over personal and family honor, status, wealth, and power limited to the Christian community. As we have seen with regard to Ibn Daud’s promotion of certain Jewish clans in his chronicle, Jewish elites guarded their social status within the Jewish community as zealously as any Christian lord did within his own society. Although the extent of Jewish power never rose to the level of the great Christian baronies, the great Jewish families who ruled their local aljamas and had representatives rise to positions of authority in the service of kings, bishops, and other lords fought hard to maintain their place atop the Jewish social order. Competition among these leading clans was equally fierce. If members of one prominent Jewish house secured a position serving the king, their rivals might seek a position serving the queen. When Jaume I named the wealthy and powerful Salamon Alconstantini as head rabbi and judge of the Jewish community of Saragossa, with powers that extended over all Jews in the kingdom of Aragon, he inadvertently provoked a sharp protest from other Jews. Jewish opposition to Alconstantini’s appointment came from the Jewish

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oligarchy in Saragossa, led by Judah de la Cavalleria, Salamon Avenbruch, and Nahmanides. In the end, the jurisdiction of the position was eventually limited to just Saragossa and awarded to Avenbruch. According to a royal letter from 1294, Alconstantini was successful in obtaining the post of judge and rabbi for Aragon under Pere III and Alfonso III but was not able to retain the office under Jaime II.64 How are we to understand Jewish status in light of these events and their combination of positive and pejorative characterizations of the Jews? Jews and Christians interacted with one another in a variety of ways, most of which were reasonably amicable. But Christian reforms and socioeconomic resentment of royal power combined to create a context in which negative attitudes toward the Jews were pervasive. The fact that powerful kings such as Alfonso X sought to blunt or openly ignore popular rumors that demonized the Jews did not make these attitudes any less persistent or problematic. Indeed, royal willingness to privilege Jewish courtiers and whole communities with a high degree of religious and political autonomy, elevated social status, tax exemptions, and land grants could easily inflame Christian indignation. Ritualized violence against Jews, although it rarely rose to the level of murder or serious destruction of property, was a means for many within Castilian and Catalano-­Aragonese society to defend their honor as Christians, attack what they perceived as royal overreach, and reassert what they saw as their proper place within the social order. The theological construction of the Jews as untrustworthy and ill-­disposed toward all others increasingly influenced Jewish-­Christian interactions. Jews were forced to take oaths that they were not using false weights and measures, or in any other way cheating their Christian clients. Christian lenders, by contrast, did not need to make such public assurances. This was a small form of humiliation and one that Jews could bear relatively easily, but it nonetheless illuminates the degree to which popular negative attitudes toward the Jews informed Jewish-­Christian relations even in this era of general protection and prosperity. In addition to the Partidas, the court of Alfonso X also produced works such as the Libro de ajedrez, dados y tablas (Book of Chess, Dice, and Tables) and the Cantigas de Santa María (Songs of Holy Mary), both of which contain illustrations of daily life depicting members of Castile’s three religious communities interacting peacefully with one another. Yet they also contain more openly hostile images of Jews that construct them as dangerous outsiders.65 The Cantigas, a collection of 420 lyric poems in praise of the Virgin Mary and her ability to work miracles, contain fourteen illustrations in which Jews

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figure prominently. Cantiga 107 recounts the Castilian folktale of Marisaltos (lit., “Mary of the Leap”), a Jewish woman from Segovia who was tossed from a cliff in punishment for an unspecified crime but saved after she prays for help from the Virgin Mary. The Jewess then accepts baptism, choosing Mary as her new name in gratitude for the Virgin’s intervention on her behalf. The tale also appears in another work by the Dominican hagiographer Rodrigo de Cerrato, who explains that the woman had been wrongly convicted of adultery with a Christian.66 In both the lyrics and the illustrated panels of the Cantigas, it is the Jewish community that drags the unfortunate woman to the cliff dressed only in a slip (an indication, perhaps, of the sexual nature of her crime), and stands by, cheering with bloodlust, to witness the execution.67 While the primary lesson of the story is Mary’s willingness to intercede on behalf of all who sincerely petition her, a notable subtext is the juxtaposition of Christian mercy and Jewish vengefulness. Such anti-­Jewish motifs are on display throughout the beautifully rendered miniatures meant to illustrate the stories of the Cantigas. In contrast to the somewhat more benign treatment of the Jews in the literary text, their depiction in the illustrations associated with the work are markedly more negative. In the latter, the use of anti-­Jewish iconography that included exaggerated noses, exotic dress, and association with demons aggressively portrays the Jews as fundamentally diabolical outsiders seeking to prey on the innocent. This more polemical presentation of the Jews in the Cantigas miniatures echoes other popular compilations of Marian miracles that emerged from the same general setting. The first, Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora, echoed the more virulent anti-­Jewish ideology of Christian miracle tales that had circulated in northern Europe for many years. The second, a collection of tales known as the Liber Marie, was produced by the Franciscan Juan Gil de Zamora, who became associated with Alfonso’s court in the late 1270s.68 It too offers an extensive, negative depiction of Jews in keeping with general European trends and was aimed at a wider clerical and popular audience than the Cantigas. Thus, if the literary text of the Cantigas focused on the salvific power of Christian grace, other portrayals of Jews that stemmed from the same cultural milieu emphasized the Jews’ difference, ugliness, and the inherent danger they posed to Christian society. In so doing, they both reflected and promoted the popularization of anti-­Jewish motifs in Castile through a process of inscribing difference in the Jews’ body. The multiplicity of Christian attitudes regarding the Jews and their place within Christian-­dominated society stands as a reminder that not only did

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varying images of the Jews exist side-­by-­side as part of a complex Christian worldview, but that these disparate and often contradicting images could, at times, exist within the same person. The landmark cultural and legal productions associated with Alfonso’s court seem to foster an inherent tension between the demonization of Jews (literally as well as figuratively) and a demand for popular and institutional respect for their civic rights and the free practice of their religion. Moreover, the demonization of the Jews in the Cantigas, and of Jewish men in particular, carried with it an implicit challenge to the church’s longstanding claim that the Jews were both capable and worthy of salvation. The mixed messages regarding the Jews that emerge from Alfonsine literature appear to reflect the complexity of Hispano-­Christian attitudes during the second half of the thirteenth century. Church and state universally acknowledged that the conversion of the Jews was not only possible but theologically necessary. How desirable their salvation was, and thus how actively it should be pursued, was far less clear. At the close of the thirteenth century, missionary zeal was picking up steam in various parts of the Spanish kingdoms, and these implicit questions remained unexplored. By the end of the next century, they would erupt into the public consciousness in a way that few could imagine, forever altering the history of both communities.

* * * The Jewish experience in thirteenth-­century Spain was diverse and complex, encompassing both great turmoil and great advancement. Intellectually, intense creativity mixed with internal polemics of unprecedented vigor. While the various controversies and disputes regarding the nature of Judaism were, in large part, the result of a culture clash arising from the encounter between Arabized and Latinized Jews, battle lines were never so straightforward. Rather, Jewish combatants from varying social classes, regions, and cities located themselves along a continuum as they debated the relative merits and dangers of rationalism, traditional theologies, and conservative and populist forms of Kabbalah. The Jews’ relationship with their Christian neighbors was equally complex. As was the case in the Islamic world, Catholic theological and legal traditions had long viewed the Jews as an undifferentiated group. In the High Middle Ages, this approach had been offset by the relatively fragmented and localized nature of Hispano-­Christian society where the charters issued by kings and other lords to groups of Jewish settlers were more idiosyncratic. The thirteenth century saw a standardization in the

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legal treatments of Jews, as well as royal recognition of the language and ideals behind more restrictive legislation that applied to all Jewish subjects. The number of Jews who participated as translators in Alfonso X’s intellectual projects, or as tax-­collectors and advisors at his or other royal courts, were relatively few. Far more Jews suffered from the demands of royal financial policies or from royal or popular Christian anger. Religious enmity and the attendant argument that certain privileges of social status and honor should be reserved for Christians exacerbated economic and political rivalries and contributed to a pervasive view of the Jews as enemies of Christendom. These structures, which developed during the thirteenth century, both within the Jewish aljamas and between the Jews and their neighbors, would shape the course of Hispano-­Jewish history during the following century.

CHAPTER 4

Jewish Society in the Fourteenth Century

The increasing tensions between Jews and Christians from the late thirteenth century onward, although significant, should not overshadow other elements of Jewish life at the time. While Jews continued to have regular social and economic contact with their Christian and Muslim neighbors, the majority of their daily contacts, especially within larger communities, remained with other Jews. The bulk of their lives were passed in Jewish spaces, interacting with Jewish family members and neighbors, and those interactions were for the most part structured by the dictates of Jewish law and custom. As a result, relations with their Christian neighbors were not the only, nor indeed the primary, source of concern for Spanish Jews during the later Middle Ages. The same economic factors that strained relations between Christians and Jews—that is, extraordinary demands by the king for revenue and the numerous issues involved in collecting and repaying debts—exacerbated the considerable divisions and rivalries that already existed among Spanish Jews. While religious disputes continued to fester between various intellectual factions, the fault lines of these intracommunal tensions existed between socioeconomic groups within the same community, between one aljama and another, and between communal councils and those Jewish courtiers whose wealth and exemptions often placed them in direct conflict with their home community. The fourteenth century would close in a state of chaos for the Jews of Spain, stained by a level of violence, conversion, and confusion that recalled the collapse of Andalusi Jewish society two centuries earlier, and whose long-­term impact would be greater still. The upheaval that began in the summer of 1391 followed decades of devastation wrought by war, increased taxation, and the Black Death. The fallout from the anti-­Jewish riots of 1391 set in motion a series of social and religious problems in Christian society

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that would culminate in the eventual expulsion of the Jews from Spain and its territories in 1492. But as the fourteenth century dawned, none of these tragic consequences could have been foreseen. Indeed, while the Jews’ relationship with their Christian neighbors was often a source of conflict, it did not represent the most important facet of Jewish life during this period. In recalling the major themes and intricacies of Jewish society in the fourteenth century, we must take into consideration the multifaceted nature of Jewish society and recognize the centrality of intracommunal relations within the Jewish aljama. The next two chapters will explore Jewish life during the tumultuous fourteenth century. The current chapter will examine the central facets of Jewish society. It opens with a close look at the structure of this society in fourteenth-­century Spain and the ongoing tensions that existed among the various social and political groups within that society. Special consideration is given to the challenges of poverty and the maintenance of communal services, as well as to the rise of confraternal organizations as a response to these needs. Our discussion then turns to economic life and the diversity of occupations held by Jews. Among these, Jewish moneylending, trade, and the practice of medicine remained hallmarks of Spain’s Jewish communities. The chapter closes with a discussion of the key trends in Jewish intellectual and spiritual life at this time, and what they can tell us about the evolution of Jewish society in medieval Spain.

The Structure of Jewish Society While both Jewish and Christian law constructed Jews as a single group, Jewish society continued to be divided along regional lines, with local factors playing an important role in determining Jewish prosperity, mobility, and safety. Moreover, daily life was shaped by a variety of considerations that often outweighed religious identity, including personal wealth, power, gender, and profession. The highly localized character of Jewish society reflected the general structure of medieval Iberia. In the fourteenth century a politically unified Spain was still far off. The region of Murcia passed between the crowns of Castile and Aragon, while Mallorca and Provence moved between the latter and independence. Even within the kingdoms of Castile, Navarre, the Crown of Aragon, and Portugal, there remained significant cultural and social differences by region and locale. In the Jewish world there were larger and smaller

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communities, some that boasted famous scholars and yeshivot and others in which such scholarship was completely unknown. Some aljamas, such as that of Burgos, were dominated by the business of credit, while others, such as Ávila, were much more diversified by a range of artisanal occupations. Even more striking was the difference between larger communities like Burgos and Ávila and the many small Jewish settlements that dotted the Iberian Peninsula at this time. In northern Castile, for example, Jewish moneylenders, artisans, and peddlers fanned out far beyond the larger commercial centers and established a constellation of smaller communities. There is evidence of some forty-­eight different Jewish settlements in the province of Valladolid alone during this period. There were twenty-­six Jewish communities in the region of León, twenty-­five in Salamanca, twenty-­one in Zamora, seventeen in Ávila, and thirteen in Segovia, nearly all of which were relatively small. In most of these settlements, the Jewish quarter was less an urban district than a portion of a street, and Jews’ lives were enmeshed with those of their Christian neighbors to a degree that was necessarily greater than in larger centers such as Burgos, Toledo, and Seville.1 As with Christian municipalities, the leadership of the Jewish aljamas were empowered by the crown to collect taxes from the rest of the Jews who resided in their community as well as from the smaller dependent settlements nearby.2 These regional tax groupings, known as collectas, illustrate how very different the experiences of living as a Jew might be, even within the same general area. Larger Jewish aljamas were surrounded by these small satellite communities in which Jews lived with little political autonomy and few social and religious services. Jews who inhabited such small towns and villages, even if only for a few years, did so without separate kosher butchers or public baths, often without rabbinic leadership or schools or study houses, and usually without a dedicated Jewish cemetery. For those basic services Jews in these settlements had to make their way to larger communities, an inconvenience for many and an impossibility for the old and infirm. Many did without the basic services we often imagine were standard in the lives of premodern Jews, fulfilling the commandments as best they could, when they could. At times Jews moved to baronial lands to avoid paying royal taxes. The aljamas, charged with collecting taxes for the king, were faced with the problem of these scofflaws. One method of coercion was to refrain from considering them members of any Jewish community until they established their wives and children in a particular place and attended the holidays, marriage

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ceremonies, and other such events in the daily lives of Jews. However, this system for enforcing cooperation in the collective enterprise of Jewish self-­ government was often ineffective. Instead, frustrated governing councils turned to the king, queen, and other Christian lords on whose lands they resided for help in forcing recalcitrant Jews to comply. And just as the question of taxes created frictions between rich and poor within a given aljama, so too did it create tensions between different aljamas within the same collecta. Smaller aljamas would break away from their collectas and go independent when they could, while larger communities attempted to maintain their position of fiscal authority.3 Even the larger Jewish communities were of relatively modest size. At the close of the thirteenth century, there were approximately 350 Jewish families in Toledo, the largest aljama in Castile, and 200 in Seville.4 The Jews of Seville paid almost three times the amount in taxes as those of Córdoba, suggesting that the latter was quite a small community. The total Jewish population of Castile at this time was probably no more than 4,000 families, and around 2 to 5 percent of the total population of the kingdom. The situation was much the same in the Crown of Aragon, where the largest Jewish populations were found in the three capital cities: Barcelona and Saragossa (around 200 families each) and Valencia (around 250 families).5 Girona, perhaps the second most important Jewish center in Catalonia, was home to some 130 Jewish families in 1331.6 Medieval demography is always difficult, and these numbers rose and fell over the course of the turbulent fourteenth century as war, famine, plague, and migration impacted Jewish populations in different ways. Nonetheless, these estimates give us a sense of the modest size of even the largest and most prominent Jewish communities of the era. Moreover, the array of smaller Jewish settlements and the limited religious services they could provide to their inhabitants should caution against forming too homogenous a portrait of Jewish life at this time. Such a caveat can also be extended to our image of Jewish-­self-­government. In a general sense Jewish communal organization during the later Middle Ages can be defined by a handful of conspicuous features. Jewish society was comprised of distinct urban communities that enjoyed a large measure of autonomy from the municipalities in which they lived as well as from one another. These kehillot had their own courts of law and both crown and church generally supported Jewish self-­government based on Judaism’s religious and legal traditions. Wealthy and learned elites represented the Jews to the Christian world, both as official communal councilors known by various Hebrew

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and Romance titles (berurim, mukademim, zekenim, adelantados, secretarii, etc.), and as courtiers who acted as important, if unofficial, spokesmen for Jewish causes. As we have seen Jewish communal representatives proved to be skilled in navigating the hazardous world of Christian politics. They expected to face a variety of indignities and, it seems, generally bore them stoically. They also were able to obtain a certain level of legal rights for their communities, as the earliest charters and the larger royal law codes attest. Given, however, how many smaller settlements there were—and how fundamentally the size of the community might impact the Jews living there—it is important to take another, closer look at the internal composition of Jewish society. Doing so elicits several questions. How did this basic structure of Jewish self-­government play out in smaller settlements? Were Jews in these smaller communities less protected or more dependent on the aid and intervention of their Christian neighbors? Of course, even in larger communities that boasted a fully articulated government apparatus, Jewish political life was not perennially stable, competent, and free from corruption. But to understand the nature of Jewish life during this period, it will help to look at how Jews responded when their local kahal proved unable or unwilling to defend or provide for them. From the point of view of medieval Spanish political history, the fourteenth century represents a continuation of the decline in the role of Jewish courtiers that began in both Castile and the Crown of Aragon during the later thirteenth century. As a result of aristocratic demands in the late thirteenth century, Jews no longer filled the important role of royal bailiffs, which they had almost come to dominate. But their formal exclusion from this particular post did not mean they were excluded from royal service. From the point of view of Jewish history, and particularly with regard to local Jewish communities, these courtiers remained important and often problematic figures in Jewish life throughout the century. Jewish courtiers did not form a cohesive social group, per se, even though Jewish moralists often treated them as such.7 Small numbers of Jews entered into the king’s inner circle as special advisors known as privados (familiars, in the Crown of Aragon), distancing themselves further from other Jews, even other courtiers. In the Crown of Aragon, Jewish privy councilors had been relatively rare until the fourteenth century, when there was a dramatic increase in their numbers under Pere IV and his son, Joan I.8 Jews could not hold aristocratic titles in the manner of Christian nobles. The wealth, honor, and power afforded them by their positions at court were

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the closest they could come to approximating the rank of medieval lords. And much like the latter, the wealth and influence of these Jewish grandees often provoked jealousy among rival Jewish (and non-­Jewish) courtiers and the leaders of the aljamas. While Jewish communal councilors and rabbis hoped that those who served the crown and the other barons would use their positions to help defend the rights of their fellow Jews, they were also aware that many were, indeed, more concerned with the promotion of their own wealth and status. A common way for the crown to compensate Jewish courtiers was with lands and commercial buildings held in and around the judería of a given city. Thus, in addition to the prospect of a courtier interfering in matters of communal politics, local Jewish governments also had to manage absentee landlords who lived within their jurisdiction but functionally stood beyond their authority. As a result local Jewish oligarchies often resented the power, freedom, and social status enjoyed by royal favorites, especially when the latter involved themselves in local politics. One of the few ways local communities might prevent or control such interference was to denounce and discredit the courtier in question. Such was the case in Burgos when the local aljama ordered that Yuçaf Pichón, royal advisor to Enrique II, was to be put to death as an informer (malsin). While the Hebrew term malsin indicates an informer, it was regularly used as a cudgel against those court Jews whose ties to Christian authorities inherently placed them in opposition to the wellbeing of the rest of the Jewish community. Pichón was an outsider to the Burgos community, arriving in the royal city due to his proximity to the crown. He was a southerner, from one of the most powerful Jewish families in Seville, with members serving there as judges and leaders of the local kahal.9 He came into the service of King Enrique II while the latter was still no more than a pretender to the throne and remained a courtier and confidant after Enrique became king. Despite his political use of rhetoric against Jews in positions of power, the newly crowned king elevated Pichón to the rank of chief financial officer (almojarife mayor) and chief tax-­collector (contador mayor) for all of Castile, positions that also carried broad administrative powers. In the end the king suppressed the decision of the Burgos kahal, but their attack on Pichón shows that Jewish kehalim could respond to political challenges posed by royal favorites in much the same way as their Christian counterparts responded to the Jews. To be sure, not all courtiers were vilified by their fellow Jews. Those Jews who enjoyed royal favor—whether from the king, the queen, or other members of the royal family—could act as unofficial representatives of the Jewish

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communities and were often generous patrons of religious institutions. When Alfonso XI ascended the Castilian throne in 1322, he took several Jews as his courtiers, including his physician, Samuel ibn Wakar, and his almoxarife, Don Yuçaf de Écija. The latter used his wealth and connections to become a major patron to the Jewish communities with which he was associated. He donated funds to build a new synagogue in Seville and directed the rents from properties he owned in nearby Écija to be used to support a yeshiva there. Ibn Wakar and Don Yuçaf sparred with one another over their influence at the royal court and over the lucrative position of tax-­gatherer for the lands along the southern frontier with Granada. Their rivalry had tragic consequences as first Yuçaf and then Ibn Wakar fell out of royal favor and were imprisoned, tortured, and put to death. Their deaths were commemorated in the poetry of their contemporary, Samuel ibn Sasson, who summed up the fate of so many Jewish courtiers: “time engulfs those raised into the clouds; exceptional men fall precipitously.”10 Another courtier who rose to great heights and fell just as far was Samuel Halevi Abulafia. Born into one of the great aristocratic Jewish clans of Toledo, Halevi was trained from his youth to enter royal service. He quickly rose to prominence, becoming a tax farmer and eventually chief treasurer to King Pedro I while still in his thirties. By 1357 Halevi had built a splendid mansion for himself in Toledo with an adjoining private synagogue. The synagogue, known today as “El Transito,” still stands as a monument to the power and prestige enjoyed by the great Jewish courtiers. Built in the splendid mudéjar style beloved by his royal patron, Pedro, the Transito synagogue displayed the royal coat of arms of Castile-­Leon as a prominent decorative motif. For those Jews close enough to Halevi to be welcomed to the great man’s house of prayer, the statement of his proximity to power was unmistakable. As with Zag de la Maleha in the previous century, however, Halevi soon fell prey to political intrigues. In 1360 he was arrested on charges of corruption and stealing royal funds; he was tortured and put to death. At times Jewish courtiers were active participants in the venomous world of royal politics. Maintaining political neutrality was almost impossible, and so Jews associated with the royal court aligned themselves with one of the various factions constantly vying for dominance with one another. Rivalries among court Jews were therefore quite common. As illustrated by the case of Yuçaf Pichón cited earlier, these courtiers also posed a significant problem for the local aljamas in which they maintained their official residence. Their service to the crown often exempted them from their financial obligations to

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their aljamas, and functionally put them beyond the rule of the local Jewish kahal. The Jewish communities could do little but accept the situation. In some instances Jewish communal governments were successful in appealing to the crown and forcing Jewish notables to submit to local taxes and to the jurisdiction of the kahal. But such victories still needed to be enforced. In Jewish communities, as throughout medieval Muslim and Christian societies, the rich and powerful always had an advantage. In other instances the conflicts between court Jews and the kahal were not over royal exemptions but arose when the king empowered a courtier to intercede in communal affairs as a royally appointed judge.11 The number of these cases increased over the course of the later Middle Ages, although the post was left vacant at times even during this period. The centralizing political tendencies of the Castilian monarchy and the general push of the Cortes to limit the powers of Jewish aljamas combined to give rise to the figure of the crown rabbi or rab mayor.12 In Castile those Jews who sought to assume the post of rabbi and judge for a large district, or even the entire kingdom, were expected to pay for the privilege. The price rose from 200 maravedíes in the thirteenth century to 600 maravedíes by the reign of Enrique II in the late fourteenth century. Some crown rabbis were appointed for individual towns, and in other instances for a particular diocese, if appointed by bishops. In 1388 Don Pedro Tenorio, archbishop of Toledo, countered the decision of the local Jews to elect Don Çulema Alfajar as their rab mayor for the region. The archbishop cited that he was not qualified since his permanent residence was outside the province of Toledo, in Seville. Instead, Tenorio selected his physician, a certain Rabbi Hahym (Hayyim) el Levi, for the post, a move that became particularly controversial once Rabbi Hayyim appeared to have converted, taking the name “Pedro” in honor of Saint Peter but also, perhaps, his employer, the archbishop. Replacing one Jewish favorite with another for the post of rabbi and judge for the region was one thing, but replacing one with a Christian was more problematic. The archbishop, it seems, still considered the Christian neophyte Pedro to be qualified to serve as rab mayor for the province, and his letter of investiture promised the Jews that this Christian “rabbi” would continue to rule on cases between Jews in conformity with Jewish law. The letter was read out to the Jews assembled in the synagogue of Alcalá de Henares on a Sabbath day in 1395, and received support from the majority of the congregation. Although a small group of Jews rejected the archbishop’s appointment, the fact that they were in the minority indicates that a sizeable group of Jews accepted the principle that,

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despite conversion, Hayyim/Pedro was still capable of acting as chief rabbi for the province.13 Also frustrating for many Jewish aljamas was the increased number of their members who were granted tax-­exempt status by the crown. These Jews, known as francos, placed an additional burden on the rest of the community, who had to make up for their share. Their presence also provoked jealousies among Christians and fellow Jews alike. In Castile longstanding conflicts over which, and how many, Christians were granted tax exemptions had broadened to include complaints about Jews who enjoyed similar privileges. Indeed, Christian urban elites helped deflect criticism of their own tax-­ exempt status by complaining about Jewish exemptions.14 In the Crown of Aragon, Jewish francos in Saragossa and Calatayud formed a distinct subset of their communities, even maintaining their own separate butchers.15 While not all recipients of these royal privileges were able to extend their exemptions to their descendants, some families did succeed in maintaining their status as francos for several generations. The result was the creation of an elevated stratum of Jewish society, with an air of aristocracy about it and all the attendant feelings of superiority, and jealousy on the part of their coreligionists.16 In some cities rich and powerful francos succeeded in prohibiting “average Jews”—that is, Jewish taxpayers (pecheros)—from attending their weddings, circumcisions, burials, or other religious events.17 In those cities where Jewish francos enjoyed special privileges, communal councilors constantly sought to involve them in the ever-­increasing number of special taxes and funds that needed to be paid. The privileged countered by repeatedly invoking their special status to shield themselves from such contributions. In 1316, for instance, the community of Calatayud complained to the king that they had been forced to spend vast sums of money to defend Jewish creditors against accusations of fraud—efforts that also benefitted the tax-­exempt—and pleaded for the king to force the “exempt” to help defray these costs. At other times the community sought contributions from the Jews with exempt status to help pay for the construction of defensive walls for the judería. They were usually rebuffed. Efforts by the Jewish communities to involve the crown in resolving complaints like these continued on and off for much of the century, exacerbated by inconsistent royal policy. This lack of clarity on the part of the crown sowed frustration among the Jews. That the richest and most prominent members of a community should live in the Jewish quarter, enjoying the physical and financial defenses of the Jewish community, while refusing to contribute to the maintenance of these

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benefits, drove a deep wedge between them and the rest of the community. The francos were not troubled by this separation. On the contrary, it was seen as an achievement. The exemptions, and the honor and status conferred by them, served to elevate the francos above the rest of the community, an aspiration the importance of which should not be underestimated.18 Indeed, by the fourteenth century, the rough social divisions of larger Jewish aljamas had given rise to distinct ranks, “classes” or “orders,” known as “manos” (Catalan man, or mà). These were generally divided into an upper and lower order (mano mayor and mano menor), with the occasional appearance of a third middle order (mano mediana). This new and more formalized division of the Jewish community echoed the terms and general structure of urban Christian society and appears to have been most prevalent in the Crown of Aragon.19 Relations between the two (upper and lower) sectors were tense throughout the fourteenth century. Within the Jewish community, members of the more powerful mano mayor sought to disenfranchise the far more numerous mano menor, or “inferior” class, from political life. However, in many places efforts to control political power met with strong resistance from other sectors of the Jewish community. The mano menor thus came to function as something of a permanent political opposition that sought to obtain formal rights of participation in communal affairs and curtail the abuse of power by the Jewish elites. Jews born into the lower orders of society could still better their social standing through successful business practices or intellectual achievement. However, despite the availability of methods for attaining a level of upward mobility, the social hierarchy of most aljamas remained fixed with those in power staunchly resistant to social change. The portrait of Jewish social organization in Castile and Navarre is not as detailed as that of the Crown of Aragon. Here, too, though, the social dynamic of the aljamas appears to have been characterized by tensions among a handful of wealthy families and the majority of the Jewish population composed of artisans, petty merchants, small-­scale farmers, and the poor.20 Political infighting between the two social orders regularly involved a host of Christian officials. For example, when Jaume II ordered a royal judge, Domingo de Tarva, to investigate the practices of the Jewish political leadership, members of the latter responded by denouncing one of the representatives of the Jewish opposition, Abrahen Boco. Convincing his mother-­in-­law to accuse him of abuse, they had him imprisoned, hoping to put an end to his efforts to appeal to the royal government. But Boco managed to escape

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from jail and found shelter at the home of the infanta (Princess) María, daughter of the king, whose official residence was in Calatayud. The infanta did more than merely shelter the Jewish fugitive. She wrote to her brother, Prince Alfonso, who was then the chief deputy (lugarteniente) of the Kingdom of Aragon, asking him to intercede on Boco’s behalf. Her letter reflects her close relationship with Boco and his supporters as well as how he convincingly portrayed himself as a representative of the majority of the local Jewish population. María writes that “according to what I have been given to understand by the majority of the judería, [Boco] seeks justice, which falls within your purview.”21 As with many other aspects of Jewish communal life, the degree to which the old guard was able to maintain power in the face of challenges from other factions within the aljama varied greatly from one city to another. Amid the vicissitudes of the fourteenth century, key families with ties to the crown successfully retained their prominence in Toledo and Seville, and extended it into other regions, such as Murcia. These include the Levi (or el Levi, Halevi), Abulafia, Ibn Shosan (Aben Xuxen, Ben Sason, etc.), Aben Zadok, Aben Yex, and Aben Aladab (Ataheb, etc.) clans, members of which intermarried with one another.22 In Saragossa, the Alconstantini and De la Cavallería clans had close ties to the crown for generations, while in Barcelona and throughout the Crown of Aragon, new families such as the Adret, De Torre, and Abendahuet began to join the ranks of older clans such as the Benvenist, Sheshet, Bonsenyor, and Cap families, to name just a few. In the Kingdom of Valencia, a handful of successful families came to dominate the business of credit during the fourteenth century. These included members of the Sibili, Xaprut, Abnayub, Alatzar, and Morcat families.23 In addition to these great clans, smaller families also found ways to insert themselves into various areas of communal leadership. In Saragossa, Salamon Abnarrabi and his sons were active in communal governance, despite not being among the great men of the aljama, either politically or intellectually. Salamon became embroiled in the partisan conflict surrounding the great scholar Isaac ben Sheshet that resulted in the latter’s forced removal from Saragossa. Additionally, one of Salamon’s sons, Samuel, was treasurer of the aljama for a time. Salamon’s economic and political activity was relatively diversified, as seems to have been typical of politically involved Jews at this time. He was a founding member of a confraternity of Jewish drapers, for which he received an annual income. Additionally, he was involved in lending money and in renting, and generally investing in, rural properties.24

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Yet for families like the Abnarrabis, upward mobility was never easy, and their successful insinuation into communal affairs often prompted resistance, and even violence. Many of the small, densely packed Jewish quarters where some families lived for generations became breeding grounds for grudges and ongoing feuds. The few families that held power within the judería guarded that privilege closely; those who remained disenfranchised were understandably embittered. Even among the handful of ruling families, feelings of resentment routinely boiled over. In Huesca, the treasurer of the local Jewish aljama was stabbed to death not by Christian debtors or foreign soldiers, but by members of the Jewish community which he served. The motive appears to have been a longstanding dispute over taxes owed to the community. Those with enough political protection could obtain exemptions or other benefits (such as letters of safe-­conduct) from the crown or other lords, while those without were forced to either accept their lot or to attempt to relocate to another aljama. The result was that kings, queens, infantes, bishops, and other lords were routinely involved in the political and economic affairs of a wide array of Jewish communities, often at the request of one or another Jewish faction. Bribery of judges, bailiffs, and other royal officials was commonplace, as were the obvious benefits of longstanding financial and personal relationships that well-­placed Jews were able to maintain with one or more members of the royal family.25 Indeed, Jewish courtiers were not the only ones to leverage their connections to Christian authorities in order to attain power and influence within Jewish society. Wealthy merchants and bankers also sought to acquire economic and political advantage through various methods of aggression and intimidation. Abraham de Torre established himself as one of the most powerful Jews in and around the small towns of the county of Empúries in Catalonia, largely by using his wealth to hire Christians and Jews to extort and terrorize his Jewish rivals. De Torre was accused of a variety of nasty deeds— from attacking Jews at the synagogue and in their homes to strangling the babies he had with one of his Muslim concubines. Yet bringing men like De Torre to justice was a difficult task, as the wealthy and well connected—then as now—were always at an advantage in Jewish communal politics. The audacity of some thus created an atmosphere in which the threat of violence was pervasive. Joan Sibili of Valencia, for example, thought himself free of any legal restraints, boasting that he had Christian officials on his payroll.26 Murder was rare among Jews but not unknown, as were Jewish attacks on Christians. Far more common were brawls among Jews that involved fists,

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knives, swords, stones, and other weapons. They took place in homes, on city streets, and in synagogues, and were perpetrated by women as well as men. With such outbreaks of violence within Jewish communities as a general backdrop, it is perhaps not surprising that some wealthy Jews resorted to violent tactics to attain and assert their power over others. In many communities it became the norm for the wealthy to rule through intimidation, rather than through regular elections and appointments, and public consent was often ignored. They fought other wealthy Jews, hired Jewish and Christian thugs to intimidate those without means, and bribed officials to evade punishment.27 The social reality often overlooked by histories that focus on Christian-­Jewish relations is that Jews were perpetrators (and victims) of violence against one another far more often, if on a less dramatic scale, than they were victims of Christian violence.

Poverty, Piety, and Social Organization Intracommunal violence notwithstanding, the results of communal strife were not always negative. Tensions among the various socioeconomic ranks of Jewish society also gave rise to new forms of communal organization. While the independent aljama or kehillah remained the standard form of communal organization throughout Spain, the inability or unwillingness of the existing leadership to meet the needs of the lower orders of Jewish society prompted the latter to take matters into their own hands. The disenfranchised pushed communal leaders to reform and made regular appeals to the crown. But confrontational and ad hoc methods were ultimately not enough to ensure the financial support and acceptance they wanted. In many of the larger communities, Jews seeking social reform achieved more effective and permanent results through the establishment of confraternities (havarot, cofradías, or confrarías) dedicated to the welfare of their members. Such voluntary brotherhoods had long existed in Jewish society, but it was not until the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that they began to play a central role in Jewish communal life, particularly in the larger communities of the Crown of Aragon.28 In premodern Judaism, there was a religious emphasis on the care for the poor and dispossessed—widows, orphans, the elderly and the infirm—that was supposed to be achieved by the maintenance of a communal fund known as the hekdesh. Yet despite the underlying religious ideals and the historical precedent for such funds, they remained a rarity in Spain, even in many of

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the wealthier Jewish communities. Individuals could make different kinds of charitable donations to the poor, but in many places community-­run charities were often underfunded or nonexistent.29 The establishment of Jewish confraternities (havarot) was, in larger part, a response to this situation, and to the determination of the lower orders of Jewish society to look after themselves when their leaders proved unresponsive to their demands. During the fourteenth century, Jewish communities such as Saragossa, Huesca, and Teruel suffered significant social upheaval. As the formal political life of these larger Jewish communities became bogged down in political factionalism and turf wars, confraternities began to take on more and more of the duties associated with social welfare. Unlike the Christian guilds on which they were largely modeled, Jewish confraternities were generally formed for the fulfillment of a particular religious goal, rather than being defined by a group of members of a given profession. Thus most Jewish havarot served a particular religious or ethical function, usually to aid the poorest elements of society. There were havarot dedicated to the poor, to the sick, and to educating or providing books for those who could not afford them. By far the most popular, and in many communities the most elite, confraternities were the burial societies (Havarot ha-­Kabarim, Kat ha-­Kabarim, etc.). In Mallorca, by the late fourteenth century, at least four confraternities were dedicated to social activities ranging from poor relief and education to care of the sick and the burial of the dead. Some communities developed artisanal guilds as well, but even these were often dedicated to religious functions and mutual aid. The Bikur Holim society of Huesca had its own school, and the Jewish tailors’ guild in Perpignan maintained a hospice. In addition to Bikur Holim societies, which focused on financial support for the sick, there were also Shomre Holim societies, where members organized to visit and care for the sick, day and night. In some cases they also taught Torah and Hebrew to the invalids, suggesting rather strongly that the average Jew was not well-­versed in Hebrew, let alone Torah. There may also have been a belief in the curative powers of the word of God at work.30 Even with the dedication of burial societies, communal charitable funds, and individual philanthropy, there were many Jews whose poverty prevented them from observing standard religious practices. Some Jews could not afford tombstones, and in at least one case their fellow Jews wrote to a local rabbinic authority to ask if such grave markers were a necessity or merely customary ornamentation. The rabbi, Asher ben Yehiel of Toledo, assured his questioner that tombstones were indeed considered to be essential elements of Jewish

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burial for all, regardless of wealth.31 Questions such as this do not necessarily reflect Jewish insensitivity with regard to the poverty of their coreligionists, although evidence of that can also be found. Rather, they stand as a reminder that many Jewish communities struggled with providing basic religious services to their members, and that many Jews were unable to observe Judaism in the way that they, and their rabbis, thought proper. Whether or not their kahal was able to maintain a viable community chest, wealthy Jews routinely gave to the poor in a variety of ways. They would make charitable bequests in their wills that included both money and their possessions. Some might leave money for dowries for girls from poor families or leave their religious books to poor students who could not afford their own. Indeed, education, marriage, and burial stand out as the social obligations that received the most attention from individuals of means. In the absence of strong community governments, Jewish families looked after themselves, including widows and other relatives in need. It was not uncommon for the heirs of a deceased householder to sell the family house on the condition that their mother, now widowed, would be allowed to continue to reside there as long as she wanted. Here the issue seems to be an interest in monetizing property as soon as possible, likely to make such assets liquid, in order to invest the money.32 Some of the mutual aid societies that were based on occupation, such as that of the shoemakers in Saragossa, acted as communities in miniature. Members agreed to visit each other during times of sickness, provide aid in burial and mourning rites, but also to attend weddings, circumcisions, and other major life-­cycle events. In Saragossa in particular, the proliferation of Jewish confraternities in the fourteenth century seems to be tied to a class struggle taking place in that aljama. In the 1360s, as society attempted to reestablish order in the wake of the Black Death, the lower classes of Sara­gossa’s Jewish community pushed for a greater say in the decision-­making process of the kahal. Their efforts were met with stiff resistance from the great families that had always run the community and who sought to maintain their power. Shut out from their community’s governing council, members of the lower orders of society came together to form their own brotherhoods to exert a greater measure of social and religious control and authority. More than a dozen brotherhoods came into being at this time.33 These confraternities benefited from the dues paid by their members, pointing to the increasingly decentralized nature of Jewish self-­government at this time. The dues they collected and the services and sense of camaraderie

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they provided signaled—in inverse proportion—the stature and authority of the kahal. Indeed, the governing structure of many of these confraternities paralleled that of the large Jewish communities. They held annual elections for the various directors of the brotherhood (usually two or more), had a budget from which they borrowed and loaned money, and made various investments, including in urban and rural properties, which they would then rent out. They collected and distributed meat, wine, and bread to the needy, particularly unleavened bread during Passover. In some instances religion served to bridge social divides within a given aljama. In Saragossa, the Cefarim (literally, the “books”) brotherhood brought together Jews from different social classes to study Jewish texts. At other times, however, class distinctions and communal factionalism outstripped shared religious goals. The Jews of Saragossa supported three separate brotherhoods for artisans dedicated to leatherworking: one for shoemakers (çapateros), and two for tanners (cofradía de los pellejeros, cofradía de los baldreseros). The baldreseros produced finer leather goods, such as gloves and delicate bags, and thus considered themselves to be of a higher social rank than the tanners and shoemakers. They were able to maintain their own synagogue—an example of how religious devotion could reproduce, rather than transcend, communal divisions.34 As the information on the various confraternities illustrates, Jews took pains to foster a sense of meaningful community, to help one another, and to exhibit religious devotion. Indeed piety was a notable feature of Jewish life in late-­medieval Iberia, as it was throughout the premodern Jewish world. And despite the ongoing tensions within the Jewish quarter, they still shared with one another the moments of joy and sadness that life brings. At their weddings Jews sang songs that were at turns both sweet and bawdy, offering advice to the young couple and telling tales of bad marriages, impotence, and lusty affairs.35 Spanish Jews also celebrated the birth of their children with a ceremony known as fadas, hadas, or extrenas, which was practiced at least from the fourteenth century onward and later preserved as a beloved cultural custom by those who converted to Christianity. The ceremony, which was popular among both Jewish and Muslim communities, took place on the evening of the seventh day after a child’s birth, and included sweets, dances, and commemorative songs for a lifetime of luck and safety. Games of chance were also extremely popular among Spanish Jews, as they were throughout medieval Europe. By the fourteenth century Jewish

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gambling had become so pronounced that rabbinic leaders came to identify it as an addiction. In one instance a man pawned his wife’s clothes to pay his gambling debts.36 Solomon ibn Adret saw gambling as a serious communal problem and ruled harshly against gamblers who vowed to stop but were unable.37 Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet noted: “Most pious scholars refrain and discourage gamblers from making rash oaths in the hope of bolstering their resistance to the game. A fever to gamble inflicts the gambler so that he cannot control his burning desire and he must succumb.”38 At other times gamblers were unrepentant and openly flouted communal efforts to restrain them. As always, those with connections to powerful Christian lords used their influence to undermine Jewish laws in this regard. In Valencia a certain Jacob Xambell obtained a royal exemption from communal statutes that banned him from playing at dice with either Christians or Muslims. Infuriated at his blatant challenge to their authority, the aljama chose to ignore his royal exemption. But Xambell was undeterred, and in the end the community had to pay a fine of one thousand morabatins.39 Some Jews even made gambling their primary occupation. In Girona a Jewish father sought to cancel the impending marriage of his daughter when he learned that her future husband was a professional gambler. In the Jewish community of Lleida, a member of the local burial society was dismissed because he was a compulsive gambler. Whether his removal was due to moral objections or perhaps due to fiscal concerns is not clear. Nearby, in Cervera, a certain Iuçeff (Jucef) Marroquí was forced to sign an official statement promising not to play dice anymore in the town or its environs.40

Economic Life As had been the case for centuries, artisans and petty merchants continued to form the backbone of the Jewish economy in the later Middle Ages. In most communities weavers and carders were among the poorest occupations in society, and among the most popular for Jews. Other common Jewish occupations were tailor, dressmaker, shoemaker, saddle-­maker, embroiderer, and draper, all subsets of the textile and leathermaking industries. Some also acted as clothing merchants as well. Jewish women worked as weavers, embroiderers, and in other sectors of the textile industry, usually as part of a family business. They were also active in trade, moneylending, and medicine,

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or worked as wet nurses for wealthier Jewish families. Some were sex workers. Other popular artisanal occupations included metalworkers of various kinds, including blacksmiths, gold-­and silversmiths, locksmiths, braziers, and turners.41 The status and wealth afforded by such occupations varied significantly. While most workers made little more than a subsistence income, skilled artisans were always in high demand, and the best could command an impressive price for their handiwork. Such was the case for the Almali family of Saragossa, which produced generations of silversmiths and goldsmiths of renown; they were among the leading taxpayers of the aljama. Their fame reached the town of Alcañiz, where the local church contracted Juhuda (Judah) Almali to make a silver cross for the price of 540 sueldos.42 Larger Jewish communities could support more economic diversity. In Saragossa, for example, artisans made up 40 percent of the Jewish population, while in the smaller community of Borja, they made up 70 percent. Local conditions could also determine what sorts of crafts were more popular for Jewish artisans. In Barcelona, then a major Mediterranean seaport, Jews working with coral were common among the artisan class, as were cloth workers who used their expertise to make sails.43 Jews, however, rarely relied on one occupation, especially during the economically turbulent times that characterized much of the mid-­fourteenth century. Some mixed agricultural and artisanal work. Others loaned money and engaged in commerce or real estate speculation, in addition to working as artisans and physicians. Although Jews remained a largely urban population, some were engaged in direct and indirect cultivation in vineyards, orchards, and other small-­scale agriculture. Jews were involved in viticulture more than any other form of agriculture, but for the most part their involvement was as landholders and producers and sellers of wine, not as laborers.44 Some had more unusual occupations, including caring for the king’s lions and other exotic beasts, though this proved to be something of a financial burden. In the charter granted to the Jews of Molina de Aragon in 1369, the community sought to be relieved from any responsibility for the care or feeding of the royal beasts. Similarly, Pere IV ordered the Jews of Tortosa to take care of some young lions that he had recently brought to that city from Perpignan “without any excuses.”45 Other rare occupations included fencing master, who traveled with the royal family, as well as professional entertainers (juglars). Jewish entertainers are listed as performing at the royal courts of Castile and Aragon over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as for other lords including the bishop of Valencia.46

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The Business of Credit Throughout medieval Europe, Jews were firmly, and negatively, associated with the business of credit. As noted in earlier chapters, this association had taken root in the Christian imagination long before the fourteenth century. But while the largest and most active Jewish moneylenders have often caught the attention of historians, most Jews who lent money did so as an extra way of making ends meet, not as their primary or sole economic activity.47 Even relatively wealthy Jewish lenders came to specialize in minor loans or consumption loans, usually issued for terms shorter than a year. For those who relied on it as their principal occupation, lending presented several challenges. The legal costs associated with collecting debts could be daunting, and for small debts, prohibitive. When municipalities became overwhelmed by the interest on the debts they owed to Jews (or other lenders), they could renegotiate the terms of their loan. In such instances, Jewish lenders often had little choice but to accept what they could get. Collection could take years, and borrowers regularly defaulted on portions of the interest. This situation often had ripple effects on other sectors of the Jewish economy. Artisans could not be paid to do work for merchants who, in turn, could not afford to buy their wares, and so on down the line. Popular religious animosity further complicated matters between Jewish lenders and Christian borrowers. Jews had long been associated with material wealth in the popular imagination, a link that was reinforced by theological treatises emphasizing the Jews’ carnality as juxtaposed with Christian grace, and by literary classics such as the Cantar de mio Cid and the Cantigas de Santa María. And yet beginning in the twelfth century, with the growth of urban economies, Spanish society had become increasingly dependent on the business of credit, and increasingly frustrated by the cycles of debt it caused. And, as noted earlier, this frustration often led to negative attitudes toward the Jews, despite the fact that Christians also were involved with and benefited from moneylending in a variety of ways. Religious and popular condemnations of lending in general and of “usury”—that is, lending at rates above the legal norm—did little to decrease Christian society’s dependence on such transactions. By the fourteenth century, credit had become well established within the Castilian and Aragonese economies for centuries, as an essential feature of urban life. The pervasive anti-­Jewish sentiment that existed in Christian society inevitably colored these financial transactions. In the eyes of Christians, Jews were “usurious,” even when their loans kept to

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the legally established levels of interest, and avaricious, fraudulent, and conniving, even when they agreed to delay collection or forgive large portions of the debts owed to them.48 In the Crown of Aragon, two new loan mechanisms known as the censal and the violari reshaped Jewish lending practices. These were essentially long-­term public loans in which borrowers sold lenders the right to an annual pension. They offered several advantages over regular short-­term loans, including much lower interest rates and a longer repayment schedule, both of which made the censal and violari attractive means of debt consolidation. Introduced in the mid-­fourteenth century, these financial instruments quickly became a popular part of the credit economy throughout the Crown of Aragon, employed by municipalities and aljamas alike as a way of meeting the demands of royal taxation. Moreover, these new forms of financing were not considered usury by the church, easing the way for even more Christians to enter the business of lending. Christian lending consequently increased at this time, especially in the area of long-­term loans, pushing more Jews into the smaller and less lucrative short-­term loans.49 In many regions Christians came to dominate the more profitable sphere of urban lending, forcing Jews to focus increasingly on small, rural loans. As a result rural Christians became dependent on loans to urban Jews, who were not their neighbors and with whom they had little relationship beyond these financial transactions. Christian debts piled up, and the image of Jewish strangers from the cities as the source of their misery became increasingly fixed in the popular mind. Christian farmers regularly lost their farms to Jewish lenders, and although the legal mechanism of the state helped in this process, the Jews remained the face of rural Christian suffering. While this tension between urban Jewish lenders and impoverished rural Christian peasantry played into longstanding tropes of Jewish avarice and anti-­Christian animus, the actual fact of rural indebtedness to Jews was a much more intractable problem in Jewish-­Christian relations than ecclesiastical condemnations of usury. Nor were hapless Christian farmers the only ones to become victims of the vicious cycle of high taxes, loans, and bad debts. In cities as far apart as Huesca in northern Aragon and Segorbe in Valencia, Jewish communities were sometimes so desperate that they had to pawn their Torah finials to secure loans. In the case of Segorbe, the lender was the local Muslim community. Indeed, it should be noted that individual Jews as well as their communal councils borrowed from Muslim and

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Christian lenders as well as from other Jews. They faced the same problems of indebtedness as did their Christian neighbors.50 The fiscal revolution that brought more Christians into moneylending in the Crown of Aragon during the second half of the fourteenth century was slower to reach Castile. There, the repeated complaints at the various sessions of the Cortes that Jewish greed was impoverishing Christians stand as a testament to the ill will that Jewish lending continued to sow between the two communities. But, as in the Crown of Aragon, Castilian Jews also suffered from the same combination of royal avarice and fiscal mismanagement that led to their indebtedness and impoverishment, both as individuals and as aljamas. As the poet Samuel ibn Sasson noted: “In our day, the yoke has become greater, to the point that it cannot be measured, for all manner of afflictions that beset us each day. Objects more valuable than fine gold have converted into wreckage and booty because the taxes have so increased and the taxmen are unrelenting, and the burden amounts to hundreds and thousands, and the Jews are completely impoverished. The local rulers have greedy hands. And the children of Israel cried out from their servitude; but their king has increased their yoke and pursued them on account of their debt.”51 In Castile, Jews dominated direct lending—that is, loaning money at interest—but Christians dominated indirect credit on sales of goods, labor, and so forth. While a handful of Jewish banking families were able to accumulate significant wealth at this time, they were, in a way, the exception that proved the rule. Most Jews involved in lending did so because it was one of the few economic avenues open to them that could supplement their primary income and could be used to meet the constantly growing demands of royal taxation. Collecting on debts was a constant problem and often involved long, drawn-­out court cases. The urban procurators who represented the towns at the meetings of the Cortes continually pushed for controls on Jewish moneylending and, increasingly during the early fourteenth century, stricter time limits on Jewish debt-­collecting in particular. Occasionally, they found a king who championed their cause. Such was the case with Alfonso XI, who actively condemned Jewish lending for decades. While he never substantially curtailed Jewish lending practices, his vocal support for Christian debtors helped reinforce popular opinion of the Jews as greedy enemies of the Christian populace.52 Another important economic activity for Jews in the fourteenth century was real-­estate speculation and renting. Jews leased lands to other Jews and to Christians, often to several generations of the same family. Some of

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these investments were thus long term and created enduring landlord-­tenant relationships. Jewish involvement in real estate was tied to the business of credit. Lands and rents became a way for successful lenders to diversify their investments. At times Jews also alienated land to Christians or hid loans and debts in real estate exchanges. Jewish lenders also took advantage of the tensions between the crown and other nobles, working with the latter to aid the economies of baronial lands in exchange for help in hiding profits from royal scrutiny. Those Jews whose financial and commercial networks were wide and strong enough could play royal, baronial, and municipal jurisdictions against each other to their own advantage. Moneylending also became an important economic activity for Jewish women, particularly among widows. Indeed, wealthy Jewish women without husbands or adult sons often lent money themselves, sometimes in conjunction with other women in their extended families. Married women often appear as signatories on loans, but just how involved they were in such transactions is uncertain. In some cases husbands made their wives executors of their wills, and it was quite common for widows to continue to play an integral role in the financial lives of their families. In both Castile and the Crown of Aragon, there is evidence that Jewish widows took advantage of their new status to play a larger and more direct role in business than they had when their husbands were alive. In addition to their business activities, Jewish w ­ idows also made significant bequests that speak to their piety, general engagement in the community, and personal authority. One Jewish woman made two generous bequests, one commissioning a new Torah scroll and another for poor brides in need of dowries.53

Jewish Merchants and Commercial Agents During this period Jews continued to be involved in various forms of trade, though less and less over time. Perhaps even more than in any other sector of the Jewish economy, Jewish participation in trade during the later Middle Ages varied greatly from one region of the peninsula to another. In Barcelona, Jews continued to play an active role in long-­distance commerce throughout the fourteenth century, reaching as far as Egypt, Cyprus, and Palestine. In Mallorca maritime trade remained the lifeblood of the Jewish community.54 But in other regions the fourteenth century represented a period of dramatic decline in long-­distance trade.

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Beginning in 1292 the Jews of the Crown of Aragon were forbidden to trade in the most important and valuable commodities. Valencian Jews continued to trade heavily with North Africa and routinely entered into business partnerships with Christian and Muslim partners. However, they were increasingly relegated to participating in less valuable sectors of trade and with less valuable merchandise as Christian merchants began pushing Jews and Muslims out of the marketplace. In fourteenth-­century Valencia, Muslims played a much larger role in international trade than Jews, especially with regard to North Africa and Granada. Although Jewish merchants continued to be active throughout the Crown of Aragon, they dealt in increasingly smaller quantities, and shifted from long-­distance to local and regional trade. They became distributors of surplus foodstuffs, as well as wine, textiles, clothing, and related products, and peddled a variety of articles to smaller markets. Jewish peddlers roamed from town to town, and even longer distances, from eastern Castile across the border to the towns and cities of Aragon and Valencia, and vice versa. They traded in spices, oil, and cheese, but more commonly in commodities needed by other Jews, in particular those engaged in the textile and leather-­and metalworking trades. Thus typical inventories for Jewish peddlers during this period included leather, burlap, brass buttons, scissors, needles, thimbles, as well as farm tools. Even those who traded in luxury items, such as silks, saffron, and gold thread, usually did so in relatively modest amounts.55 As Jewish influence in large-­scale and long-­distance trade declined, they increasingly became commercial agents and brokers (corredores, or corredors) for merchants, dealing with a variety of fields and products: books, clothing, animals, and foodstuffs. Perhaps the most popular form of Jewish brokerage during this period, which increased in popularity into the fifteenth century, was that of the broker or agent “of the ear” (corredor de oreja, in Castilian, and corredor d’orellà, in Catalan). These agents did not have a particular field of expertise but generally kept their ears open for potential matches between vendors and buyers. They were expected to be discreet and tended to handle transactions that were of greater value or of a more sensitive nature, ranging from real estate and loans to marriage alliances. The number of Jewish brokers could be limited by law, as was the case in Saragossa, where the merchant guild ensured that Christian brokers outnumbered Jews by more than two to one. Nonetheless, the role of the corredor remained an important part of the Jewish economy throughout the later Middle Ages, and one that continued to link Jews to their Christian and Muslim neighbors through mutual business interests.56

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The Practice of Medicine Jews were also closely associated with the profession of medicine, in its various forms, throughout Christian Iberia and Provence. Indeed, Jewish physicians were among the most recognizable figures in the judería, along with tanners, weavers, and moneylenders. And, as in the case of Jewish lenders, the services of Jewish physicians, surgeons, and midwives were in such demand that they drew clients from all religious communities, regions, and social classes. Even as Christian society sought to exert greater legal control over the medical profession over the course of the later Middle Ages, Jewish doctors remained a fixture in both Castilian and Catalano-­Aragonese society. Jewish doctors could be found working in nearly every region and town, appearing in villages such as Arbós (L’Arboç) near Tarragona, and relatively small towns like Santa Coloma de Queralt, Valls, and Besalú.57 Jewish women also practiced medicine, both as licensed physicians and surgeons and unlicensed “curers,” and were in demand as midwives for a variety of clients, including the Aragonese royal family.58 Attending to kings and princes, Jewish physicians were also in demand by nearly all other sectors of Christian society. In 1302 the municipality of Saragossa declared the medical services of Salamon Avenjacob to be indispensable to the city. The king was asked to exempt Avenjacob from royal taxes, and the local Jewish community was asked not to assign him any communal post so that he could be free to tend the sick. Both requests seem to have come from Avenjacob himself. A year later another Jewish physician from Saragossa, Baron Almelich, was granted the same privileges, as were a pair of father-­son physicians from Valencia.59 In smaller towns, where physicians of any kind were rare, itinerant Jewish doctors could often find a home, a steady salary, and the respect of the local populace. While the city of Valencia was home to doctors from various religious communities, other smaller settlements in the region often had to recruit doctors and surgeons to come and attend the needs of their citizens. Such was the case in Elche and Jérica, Valencia. These two towns actively sought to persuade Jewish physicians to move there, together with their families. Similar cases can be found in various locales in Castile where municipal councils and Jewish communities alike employed physicians and surgeons.60 Efforts to prohibit Christians from employing Jewish doctors began in earnest with the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 (canon 22) and were repeated at local church councils in both Aragon and Castile over the course of the next two centuries. However, as with similar attempts to regulate interfaith

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relations, these admonitions and threats of excommunication were largely ignored. Christian kings and nobles, burghers, peasants, and various ranks of clergy all made regular use of the services of Jewish doctors and surgeons. In Saragossa the archbishop had his own Jewish physician, Todroz Benvenist, and another Jewish doctor, Mossé Alazar cared for the monks of an entire Franciscan convent. As in the case of the archbishop, it was common for wealthy Christians to keep Jewish physicians on retainer by paying them an annual pension just in case their services might be needed.61 The Crown of Aragon boasted several centers for the study of medicine, including Lleida (Lérida), Perpignan, and Montpellier, which was part of the Crown of Aragon until the mid-­fourteenth century. While Jews were not permitted to study at these schools, they were nonetheless influenced by contacts (both direct and indirect) with some of their most prominent Christian students. Jewish physicians appear to have trained privately, both with Jewish and non-­Jewish instructors, and often followed other family members into the profession. As with rabbis, Jewish doctors ranged from elite scholars who sought to translate and comment on medical texts from various traditions, to the less academically minded practitioners who appeared more interested in the material and social benefits of the profession. The high demand among Christians for medical expertise in late medieval Spain was an important factor in the development of Jewish-­Christian relations. If religious polemics and economic tensions exerted a negative influence on this relationship, they were often countered to some degree by personal medical needs and the appreciation of competent physicians regardless of their religious community. The esteem in which physicians were held, and the subsequent wealth that successful practitioners could acquire, naturally contributed to the popularity of the profession, for this wealth could then be invested in loans, real estate, and commerce. But Jewish doctors were also drawn to the profession by the status and honor it afforded them. Physicians were routinely exempt from local and royal taxes, granted freedom to travel, and treated with some respect by nobles and clergy. For those physicians who attended the various members of the royal family, tax exemptions could raise them to the level of francos within their home communities for periods of ten to thirty years. In the case of Abraham Caslari (or de Castlar), Jaume II granted him exemption from all taxes and subsidies, a privilege that was also extended to Abraham’s heirs. As always such exemptions elevated the status of the physician within his local community while simultaneously increasing the financial burden on

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the rest. When he received these royal privileges, Abraham Caslari was living in Besalú, a town in northern Catalonia that was the home of a small but significant Jewish community. Unlike the case in larger cities such as Barcelona and Saragossa, in small Jewish communities the exemption of even one wealthy member of the Jewish community could result in economic hardship, and resentment.62 Curiously, Besalú had a disproportionate number of Jewish doctors, yet despite their number they did not seem to lack for work. Caslari followed his father, David, into the profession of medicine, as was common practice for doctors as it was for many other occupations On the elder Caslari’s death in 1316, Abraham signed a contract with the town of Besalú in which he promised to “look at and assess all the urines brought to me by the citizens [of Besalú], whom I will advise as to the bloodletting and diet, and generally as to their manner of life, and I will visit two or three times all the sick of the town who ask me to attend them.”63 Beyond the potential tax exemptions given to the most prominent Jewish doctors, the general esteem with which physicians were held in Christian society was a major motivation for Jews to take up the profession. Leon Joseph of Carcassonne, a Jewish physician and translator of Christian medical texts who lived in Perpignan, offered the following testimony in this regard: When I lived among the Christians, I was of an inferior condition in their eyes, for there is none of our nation who is honored in their eyes except him who is a physician and who cures them of their ills; in such case, he sits at the table of kings and remains standing before them, whether he be of humbler birth or of high rank, owing to his knowledge of medical science. . . . I understood this and took it as my model, and said to myself: I shall go in search of Jewish physicians and I shall beg them to have mercy on me and to teach me their science in exchange for a small payment or free of charge, for the money of my purse has been exhausted.64 Such was the dream of honor and upward mobility of a studious young Jew at the outset of his professional career. But as Leon sought tutelage in the medical sciences, he was quickly demoralized at the state of the profession within Jewish society. The majority of those who practice the art of medicine among my ­people do not intend to fathom the depths of their object; even if they

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were able to go into greater depth, they do not wish to tire their intelligence with this, and they mutter: this science is not a true science, but rather a skill; and with a “sound of tumult” [Ezek. 1:24] everybody wishes to turn it into a means of existence. . . . How many physicians do we see, lacking in understanding, who have gathered treasures of gold and silver, without ever having passed a single examination; whereas others who have always been in pursuit of books have obtained knowledge, but have not earned a penny? For this and other reasons, they have not whiled away their time in the study of medical books, but in their leisure time they drink and lie together in the flesh and do other unworthy acts, such as reading books of fables, fantasies, and vanities.65 Here we can see the rift between those who valued the academic study of medicine and those who entered the profession for more worldly reasons, as well the penchant for moralizing and social criticism that was characteristic of all three religious societies in medieval Iberia. Jewish physicians also flourished in Castile, despite (or perhaps because of) the kingdom’s lack of schools for formal medical training. The decentralized nature of medical training in Castile may account for the continued dedication to Arabic medical manuals among Jewish physicians there. Those in the Crown of Aragon, by contrast, came to adopt the new forms of Latin scholastic medicine being taught at places such as Montpellier. In both regions, as well as in the Kingdom of Portugal, Jewish physicians translated several Latin medical texts into Hebrew during the fourteenth century, a testament to the importance of the subject in both intellectual and practical spheres. Among the most prominent Jewish physicians of this period were David Caslari of Besalú and his student Moses Narboni, both of whom wrote medical treatises in a response to the devastation of the Black Death.66

Intellectual Trends The fourteenth century ushered in a new era of intellectual life among the Jews of Spain. These new trends built on the expansion of the Jewish curriculum that had taken place during the previous century. The Hebrew translation movement of works written in Greek and Arabic continued to be a fundamental aspect of Jewish intellectual culture. The Provençal translator Samuel ben Judah, whose search for manuscripts to translate led him to live

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for a time in Murcia, translated Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics into Hebrew in 1324. Jewish interest in Latin, and particularly in scholastic philosophy, began to appear at the close of the century and would become a major feature of Jewish intellectual engagement in the 1400s. Disputes over philosophic rationalism and Kabbalah continued to flare up from time to time, but were generally less virulent than earlier phases of the Maimonidean controversy. Jewish scholars continued to incorporate intellectual trends from the surrounding Christian society and from Jewish centers beyond Spain. Christian culture influenced the popular folk ballads of Spanish Jews, and toward mid-­ century a Jewish poet named Shem Tov Ardutiel (alias Santob de Carrión) composed an important book of proverbs, the Proverbios Morales, in Castilian. Yet for most Jewish writers, Hebrew remained the preferred language of composition, and poetry remained tied to the Arabic forms established centuries earlier in al-­Andalus. Toward the end of the century, a circle of Hebrew poets began to flourish in Saragossa, marking something of a renaissance of that field that would carry into the fifteenth century. Additionally, the continuing influence of the Ashkenazic practice of Talmudic study for its own sake gave rise to the significant expansion of study houses in Spain during the fourteenth century. Indeed, more scholars and more laymen spent time engaging with sacred texts and seeking to reconcile apparent discrepancies in the biblical, Talmudic, philosophical, and esoteric traditions that now characterized Hispano-­Jewish scholarship. The increased popularity of these study houses also led to a greater awareness of the need to produce religious works that were meant for a broader Jewish audience. For other scholars, this awareness also appears to have expanded their interest in halakhah and the composition of legal codes.67 Perhaps most notably, however, the fourteenth century saw the development of a new genre of Jewish literature—the supercommentary.68 These were formal, extended commentaries that took as their subjects the biblical or Talmudic commentaries of earlier scholars rather than the bible or Talmud itself. This new trend elevated medieval commentators to a new level, treating their works as subjects worthy of deep analysis and discussion in a way previously reserved for the sacred texts themselves. Supercommentaries developed alongside the scribal innovation of writing various glosses of a text together with the text itself, a practice that paralleled, and was likely influenced by, similar shifts in Christian scribal culture. Previously, biblical and Talmudic commentaries had been written and circulated as separate codices, independent of the sacred texts they interpreted. This change in the way

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manuscripts and early books were written helped normalize the practice of reading Scripture and commentary together, raising the relative importance of the commentary, and thus the commentator, in the process. In so doing these supercommentaries helped elevate the commentaries of a small group of leading exegetes from popular to nearly canonical. Emerging in the rabbinic academies of fourteenth-­century Spain, the genre built on a practice of blending traditionally Andalusi interpretive techniques with those of Ashkenazic scholars established over the course of the previous century. By far the most popular subject for these supercommentaries was the work of Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes—known as Rashi—the preeminent biblical exegete from northern France, illustrating that the integration of Ashkenazic religious texts into the Spanish Jewish tradition was still in process. The other two scholars whose work became popular subjects for supercommentaries at this time were, however, Sephardim: Abraham ibn Ezra, Rashi’s Spanish counterpoint, and Nahmanides, who himself sought to blend these two disparate exegetical traditions. A notable component of this new trend was the effort of these fourteenth-­century scholars to explain the cryptic allusions embedded in both Ibn Ezra’s and Nahmanides’ biblical exegesis. While such efforts were less dramatically creative than the scholarship of the thirteenth century, they nonetheless helped the more hesitant kabbalistic writing of Nahmanides and his circle to reach a wider audience. Moreover, while the supercommentaries on Ibn Ezra were generally meant for advanced scholars, at least some of those on Rashi and Nahmanides were intended for a more popular reading audience that was developing over the course of the fourteenth century. Similarly, this period also witnessed a rise in commentaries on the Mishnaic tractate Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Fathers), a classical compilation of ethical maxims beloved by scholars and popular audiences alike.69

New Trends in Jewish Spiritual Life The basic features of religious life among the Jews of Spain were well established by the later Middle Ages. Communal life centered on the synagogue as a site of prayer, learning, and the adjudication of Jewish law. Larger communities might have several synagogues as well as separate houses of study for advanced scholars. Yet for much of the Middle Ages, the responsibility for spiritual care was largely left up to the individual and his or her family. Indeed, most Jews learned the various aspects of Jewish customs and

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traditions from relatives and neighbors and through direct participation in the rhythms of Jewish life. Similarly, smaller communities followed the order of prayers and other synagogue customs established by larger and more influential communities. In many ways the synagogue represented a microcosm of Jewish society in which the social tensions and cultural characteristics of the period were on display. Old complaints from rabbis in al-­Andalus regarding the lack of piety, grace, or learning in the synagogues could still be heard throughout the later Middle Ages. The great scholar Menahem ibn Zerah lamented that many among his fellow Jews lacked decorum and earnest intention (kavannah) in prayer. Regarding the Aleinu prayer in particular, Ibn Zerah argued that it should be said with greater kavannah than existed in his day, when cantors rushed through it and congregants chanted the prayer out of sync with one another. Ibn Zerah’s comments on synagogue behavior were echoed by Asher ben Yehiel, then the leading Jewish scholar in Toledo. The German émigré noted that, in comparison to the Ashkenazi communities, those in his adopted home of Castile had the practice of “intruding” on the hazzan’s singing with their own in a most discordant manner. As had been the case with the great rabbis of Muslim Spain, Asher’s high aesthetic standards for Jewish worship seem to have been the exception that proved the popular rule.70 Communal prayer also reflected the larger social divisions within Jewish society. From Toledo, Asher ben Yehiel admonished a petitioner who was displeased with the custom in some parts of Castile of appointing prayer leaders from less-­than-­prominent families. The complaint here was that, by taking prayer leaders from the class of artisans, they associated the honored synagogue position of cantor with other, lesser, occupations, thus debasing it. The letter-­writer clearly expected the great rabbi to agree with him and help to enforce his faction’s control of this key synagogue position, but he found no such support. Instead, Asher adds his own complaint regarding how the Castilian communities selected their cantors. You have written that it is customary in these places to appoint someone from a lesser family as a prayer leader, and that there is in this matter a denigration of the act of public prayer, as if it were not inappropriate for the most distinguished families of Israel, and nothing more than one of the common crafts. God forbid that divine service should be considered a common craft; it is, rather, a crown. I, too, complained against the cantors of this land [Castile] since the day I

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arrived here. But I did not object on the grounds you mention with regard to family pedigree. This is not proper in the eyes of God, for if he is from a distinguished family but is wicked, what benefit is his pedigree before God? . . . [Rather], I was angry because the cantors of this country take pleasure in listening to their own pleasant voices, and even if the cantor is completely wicked, the community will still appoint him if he has a sweet voice.71 Here concerns with controlling and protecting personal honor and maintaining clear demarcations between social classes in Jewish society overlap with tensions between religious piety and aesthetics. Both contempt for the lower social orders of Jewish society and the willingness to privilege singing ability over moral character appear to have been notable characteristics of Castilian Jewry during this period. Disputes over who might fill the position of cantor were also common in the Crown of Aragon. A responsum of Solomon ibn Adret records a case from the town of Huesca that offers further insights into the social fabric of the Jewish community there. As in Castile, the Jews of Huesca became divided over the acceptability of a cantor with an unpleasant singing voice. Yet once again the legal suit described in what follows illustrates that such disputes also touched on several other key aspects of Jewish society. The problem began when a member of the congregation made the following charge of their longtime cantor: You were prayer leader in the synagogue in Huesca for thirty-­eight years and now have grown old and your hair is gray, and you can no longer fulfill your duties as you once did. You have given us your son in your place, and he is not as worthy as you because his voice is not pleasant. I, and some of the other members of the aforementioned synagogue, do not want him to lead prayers. If you can still lead prayers, then so be it. But if you cannot, please stay home. [The cantor] replied: “It is possible that some of my strength has failed and my eyes have dimmed from aging and I cannot see and read the Torah as I once did. Yet, in all other matters a cantor is obligated to perform, I am as strong as ever. I appeal to the congregation that regularly worships in the synagogue that they treat me with kindness for the remainder of my years as they did with my ancestors, for my father and my father’s father were cantors for generations [who

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served] for their entire lives and no deficiency was found [to issue] from their lips. And while my aforementioned son does not have a pleasant voice, he fills the role of my ancestors in all other ways. My son will read the Torah in my place and he will serve as the communal secretary and by so doing the community will not violate the ordinance that I have inherited from my ancestors, may their memory be for a blessing. Those who appointed me to serve over them as a cantor all the days of my life did so with a legal agreement, and no one else can serve in any capacity but me, or my designated substitute, as the ordinance states. Besides, it is the desire and will of the majority of the community, about 150 members, to treat me with compassion and mercy for the sake of my ancestors who were cantors for them and their ancestors, and they want my son to assist me in all the aforementioned duties for all the days of my life. [By contrast], the people that you represent number no more than ten.”72 In his response, Ibn Adret sided with the elderly cantor, echoing the sentiments of his counterpart in Toledo, Asher ben Yehiel, in noting that the quality of the cantor’s voice should not be the community’s primary concern. He argues that, as long as the son “is of good character and not guilty of any personal transgressions it is fitting that he be given preference over anyone else, based on what I see from the custom of those places where sons of cantors are appointed by congregations to succeed their fathers. In this case, his father and father’s father were cantors—according to the wording of his claim—and [our sages] of blessed memory articulated an important principle that if the son is worthy, he takes precedence over all other men.”73 As in the earlier-­cited case from Castile, the situation in Huesca was one in which a small yet seemingly vocal minority sought to override the will of the majority. In both cases the question of decorum and aesthetics seems to have been of particular importance to this minority and is juxtaposed (whether fairly or not) against a generally more open and understanding community. It is also interesting to note that the position of cantor, which went beyond leading the prayer service, was one that was often passed down from father to son, with several generations of a single family serving the same congregation in this regard. This system fits the typical model in medieval Hispano-­Jewish society in which professional offices and positions, from royal tax-­collectors to artisans, often remained within a single family. Clearly for the cantor this practice was not only typical but carried with it a certain

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level of honor—a social commodity of great value in his society. While Ibn Adret points to the normativity of the legal custom in this regard, the cantor’s focus is more on the longstanding bond between his ancestors and the congregation, and on the relative dishonor that was being shown to his family by those who wished to cast him aside due to age and to dismiss his son due to his voice. We do not know the outcome of either of these cases. The rabbis involved here—Asher ben Yehiel and Solomon ibn Adret—were two of the most widely respected and influential scholars of the later Middle Ages. Yet we cannot take for granted that their judgments in these cases were enough to reverse the tide of popular practice. As much as a both rabbis and a sector of the laity sought to bring about religious reforms and move Jewish society toward greater piety, there remained significant gaps in opinion as to just how that should be accomplished. The issue here was not so much piety versus religious laxity, but the varying levels of understanding as to what proper religious behavior entailed. Scholars might be informed by the full sweep of Jewish theological arguments and legal traditions but the majority of the Jews among whom they lived were not. The latter relied on local customs and traditions, familiarity with which brought them a sense of certitude and comfort. Few reacted well when they were told that they, and their ancestors, had not been observing Judaism correctly. Indeed, rabbinic literature from this period is strewn with examples of unsuccessful attempts to correct popular religious and social behavior. Isaac bar Sheshet Perfet noted that he tried to change certain synagogue customs in Saragossa for the holy day of Rosh Hashanah, but that the congregants held fast to their local practice. Other scholars lamented the general neglect of the precept of tefillin in many communities, but their complaints made little impact. It is perhaps this intransigence with regard to amending religious practices that prompted Solomon ibn Adret to implore communal leaders in Castile to exhibit caution when attempting to regulate Jewish piety, noting that “patience and consensus will cause the majority to return to the proper path.”74 Even in matters that were clearly related to moral behavior rather than rituals or religious custom, rabbis found it difficult institute reforms. In the Valencian town of Xàtiva, a wealthy Jew bought, for a low price, the right to sit on benches in the synagogue. He then sought to rent them out at an exorbitant markup. When the matter was sent to Isaac bar Sheshet Perfet for his opinion, the latter reminded his correspondents that the synagogue belonged to all Jews and should not be bought and sold in this fashion. However,

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beyond using his moral authority, there was little the great scholar could do to effect change in such a situation. Similarly, while rabbis engaged in longstanding debates about the permissibility of wearing jewelry on the Sabbath, the Jewish community had long since accepted the custom and vied with one another in the refinement of their dress without ever considering themselves to be impious.75 The rabbinate was barely professionalized at this time. Unlike in the Christian world, where the clergy formed a distinct and relatively sizeable sector of the population, rabbis rarely made their living solely or primarily as communal teachers and judges. Leading scholars might head study houses but did not hold formal positions within the Jewish community, while others practiced medicine or banking in addition to their roles as religious leaders. Most small Jewish settlements did not have study houses dedicated to advanced learning, and religious literacy remained rudimentary for most Jews, even in larger communities. Wealthier families hired tutors (melammedim) or rabbis to educate their sons, and in some cases their daughters. Nonetheless, there existed a notable gap between a highly literate elite and the majority of the Jewish community, whose command of religious texts extended no further than a knowledge of the prayers, which may or may not have included the ability to read the prayer book.76 The later Middle Ages witnessed an important shift in this dynamic. Over the course of the fourteenth century in particular, Hebrew literacy increased among a wider swath of the Jewish community, and with it, a greater interest in pastoral care on the part of Jewish scholars. More and more Jewish men came to see the serious study of Jewish texts as an integral part of their spiritual lives, regardless of their occupation. They spent more time at study houses and supported them through charitable contributions. Jewish scholars responded by becoming more involved in educating the community via public sermons and by developing new genres of literature aimed specifically at this new group of religiously literate laymen. These sermons and books, which found a ready audience, explained the underpinnings of Jewish religious customs associated with daily life, major life-­cycle events, and religious festivals. With the notable exception of Jewish law, the religious literature produced at this time did not have the longstanding impact on the history of Judaism that can be attributed to the works of Nahmanides and the Zohar in the previous century, or the poetry and rhymed prose of the Andalusi golden age. Yet with regard to its influence on contemporary Jewish society, the developments in Jewish religious literature during the fourteenth century were transformative.

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As popular interest in religious activity began to rise, an important vehicle for the expression of piety was participating in prayer and penitence over and above the three daily prayers dictated by Jewish law. Spanish Jews had begun the practice of late-­night devotional vigils (ashmurot) in al-­Andalus and continued this practice after relocating to Christian territories. The great Andalusi moralist Bahya ibn Paquda had urged the pious to engage in individual prayer vigils, in addition to their regular daily prayers. His classic work, Duties of the Heart, remained popular among Jews during the later Middle Ages, and by the fourteenth century the practice of ashmurot had expanded into communal gatherings. These became sufficiently popular among small groups of devotees that some communities sought to formalize their structure. In Saragossa a group founded the Leil ashmurot (“night vigil”) society. In this culture, it would seem, a small subset of the overall society sought to express a greater sense of piety, and to do so in a formal and organized manner. As noted earlier, Jews in several cities also established other private fellowships (havarot) dedicated to pious acts ranging from visiting the sick and aiding in the rituals surrounding burial to providing for the education and material wellbeing of the Jewish poor.77 Scholars took note of these pious trends and saw an opportunity for even greater religious reforms. Traditionally, most Jews had accepted local religious customs as normative without much thought. Jews embraced practices like that of the midnight prayer vigil simply because this was how a pious Jew behaved in their community. Writers such as Israel Al-­Nakawa believed that greater understanding of such customs would ultimately strengthen popular religious commitment. The following excerpt from his Candelabrum of Light is an example of the sort of spiritual teaching that became increasingly popular in Spain during the fourteenth century. As the month of Elul is the month of repentance, it is customary from the beginning of the month of Elul until [the holy day of] Yom Kippur to rise very early to recite penitential prayers and supplications. During that period, men rise at midnight to supplicate and plead for their lives before the Holy One, blessed be He, who sits on a throne of judgement and judges who among all his creatures is to live and who is to die. We have evidence of this in what King David said (Ps. 119.62): “At midnight I will rise to give thanks unto Thee because of Thy righteous ordinances.” Another reason for this practice is that at midnight a man’s mind is composed, the body inactive and the blood purified,

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so that he can concentrate with his mind and heart during the last watch and achieve more than he can during the day. Therefore, the pious of earlier generations established the custom of rising during those nights to supplicate and pray before the Creator, blessed be He, until the light of the day. And the Holy One hears the prayers and supplications that a person recites at night and answers them, because that is the hour of divine good will.78 This passage offers a revealing glimpse of the Jewish worldview from this period. For Al-­Nakawa and his reading audience, the connection of the body and health to religious service blended organically with biblical exegesis and with a quasi-­mystical understanding that certain times of day are better than others for connecting to the divine. The integration of kabbalistic ideas into Jewish prayer and general religious outlook that had begun in the late thirteenth century continued apace. This new theosophical outlook brought with it the democratizing notion that all Jews were responsible for the maintenance of the divine presence in the lower (i.e., natural) world, and for the balance between the lower and upper (supernatural) worlds. Observance of the commandments was thus key to the regulation of the universe, and perhaps no act was more important than that of prayer. As the kabbalist Joseph of Hamadan wrote: “The prayer of the people of Israel is the essence of the cosmos, and the nourishment for all the world.”79 Just how many Jews understood and agreed with this sentiment is hard to say. At the very least such thinking energized many among their religious leadership, and found its way into sermons. However, other Jewish leaders viewed this new spiritualization of prayer as problematic. In Tudela, for instance, Joshua ibn Shueib preached against the study of Kabbalah by those who were intellectually unprepared for such powerful material. Ibn Shueib’s admonition against intellectual innovation echoed similar protests against changes in the social order of the Jewish aljama that would allow new groups greater participation in communal government. As a scion of one of the eight leading families that sought to maintain exclusive control over the governance of Tudelan Jewry, Ibn Shueib aimed to preserve the prevailing status quo as well as the spiritual wellbeing of the community in his sermons. He wrote: “No one should go beyond his own rank and challenge the status of appointed officials and those of high rank, for their position was given to them by God. . . . In this matter, many err when they say ‘we are all the children of one man—I am as good as so and so; why is he in

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this position and not I?’ This is utter foolishness.”80 Here we see that interest in greater popular involvement in religious life could be inhibited by challenges to the sociopolitical order and questions of intellectual control. It is a reminder that, while Jewish preachers aimed at exhorting their fellow Jews to greater piety, their definition of what was “pious” varied. For some, knowing your place and honoring your social betters were key elements of that piety. Nonetheless, Ibn Shueib produced a collection of sermons for each weekly Torah portion as well as all yearly festivals, making extensive use of kabbalistic material and forming an influential part of the movement to elevate the religious literacy of Iberian Jews. The relatively new importance of Jewish preaching became a hallmark of Jewish religious life during this period. To say that this phenomenon was merely a response to the popularity of Christian preaching, and Christian preaching to Jews in particular, would be an oversimplification. The fourteenth century witnessed an expansion in the number of rabbinic scholars as well as the number of those who, although they did not emerge as productive scholars, spent significant amount of time at rabbinic houses of study. Both groups contributed to the amplification of religious knowledge in Jewish society and in the growing interest in discussions of religious subjects. These developments were as much a factor in the popularity of the Jewish sermon as the religious pressures brought on by Christian missionary activity. Thus from the mid-­thirteenth century onward, as Christian preachers began to deliver sermons to captive Jewish audiences, Jewish preachers also traveled throughout Spain, delivering sermons at synagogues, weddings, and other public gatherings with their own messages of ethical reform. The expansion in Jewish lay piety led to an increased interest in the sermon as an important bridge between the study house and the public sphere. The Jewish preachers who arose at this time were often also scholars steeped in biblical and Talmudic exegesis. They drew on this considerable scholarly training to craft written versions of their oral sermons for posterity and used some of the personal and emotional characteristics of their oral sermons in their otherwise scholarly commentaries. Among the more famous preachers were leading scholars Jonah Gerondi of Barcelona and Moses of Coucy, a French rabbi who toured Spain and urged the Jews there to exhibit greater piety. In Toledo, where the older Andalusian religious tendencies were perhaps more ingrained than anywhere else in Christian lands, a major shift took place with the arrival of Asher ben Yehiel and his sons, Judah and Jacob, during the first decade of the fourteenth century. With their installation as

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the premier religious authorities in the city, and indeed in all of Castile, this rabbinic dynasty succeeded in establishing a center of religious learning that emphasized Ashkenazic approaches to the study of Talmud and to the study of religious texts generally. The increase in itinerant Jewish preachers paralleled a trend toward developing standard manuals for Jewish sermons. Jacob Anatoli’s Malmad ha-­Talmidim (Teacher of Disciples, or Goad to Students) is an early collection of sermons, dedicated to his sons, which was intended to goad them to study and to embrace Maimonidean philosophy. This work served as an early model for the books on sermons that would become popular during the following century. Bahya ben Asher, a student of Solomon ibn Adret’s who emerged as a leading biblical exegete in Saragossa, wrote what is probably the first Jewish sermon manual, Kad ha-­Kemah (The Flour Jar). While it is not purely by coincidence that the first Jewish sermon books began to appear in the wake of the great Disputation of Barcelona, mostly in the Crown of Aragon and Provence, the writing and collecting of Jewish sermons was not a response to Christian polemical preaching to Jews. It appears instead to be inspired by Christian preaching to Christians. Jews too wished to deliver comprehensive lessons on their religious faith and practices to broader audiences that included both advanced and less advanced students. Nahmanides himself wrote several discourses that vary widely in both theme and tone and functioned as models for others. Similarly, Ibn Shueib’s sermons were meant for serious study as well as popular performance, and Isaac Aboab’s popular Candelabrum of Light, which brought together an array of ethical, legal, and homiletical literature, was yet another important guide for public sermons.81 Thus began an extended period of religious development within Iberian Jewry that paralleled, and was perhaps spurred on by, the atmosphere of popular religious reform that pervaded the surrounding Christian society at the time. Prior to the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, most Jewish scholars in Spain wrote for other scholars and for communal judges rather than for a popular audience. With regard to halakhah, in particular, the Toledan scholar Israel Al-­Nakawa noted that Jewish legal writers produced few works on the subject of daily religious life “not because it was difficult in their eyes, but rather because it was too simple and well known to all, father and sons, and even young students.”82 As more Jews demonstrated an interest in practical guides for everyday legal and festival observance, however, a growing number of scholars took time off from the demonstration of academic virtuosity to attend to this popular need. A key factor in this process was

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the impact of the great Barcelonan rabbi Solomon ibn Adret. At the turn of the fourteenth century, Ibn Adret succeeded in producing an impressive number of students—far more than his predecessors, Nahmanides and Jonah Gerondi—and helped foster the expansion of Jewish scholarship and preaching throughout Jewish society.83 In the decades that followed, the elitist scholarly tendencies that had separated the world of the yeshiva from that of the average Jew were replaced by a culture that encouraged greater lay participation in formal religious study and sought to push an ever wider sector of the community toward greater religious observance. An example of this new interest in producing a literature aimed at an educated lay readership was The Book of Education (Sefer ha-­Hinukh), written at the turn of the fourteenth century by a student of Ibn Adret, which sought to create greater interest in the observance of the commandments, particularly among Jewish youth. Explaining the spiritual importance of the commandments, the author expresses his hope that “young men will become more interested in them, giving them attention on the Sabbath and holidays, and will desist from raging wildly in the city streets, to be enlightened by the light of life.” His words seemed to indicate that, even during this period of religious transformation in Jewish society, engaging Jewish youth was still an uphill battle.84 In the introduction to his wide-­ranging Commentary on Blessings and Prayers, David ben Joseph Abudraham of Seville lamented that most Jews of the time followed Judaism’s rituals without any real understanding of their meaning: “[They] raise their voices and pray to the God of the universe, stumbling like the blind in the dark, and they do not understand the words of the prayer, nor do they know the order of the customs and their reasons, in order to perform them correctly.” His book meant to remedy this situation by offering a clear and systematic presentation of Jewish prayer and customs to a popular audience. It first appeared in 1340, and was instantly popular, presumably among a growing class of religious teachers who shared Abudraham’s mission. The Commentary on Blessings and Prayers remained a standard text among Spanish Jews, becoming one of the first printed in the fifteenth century.85 Two important works sharing the same title: The Candelabrum of Light (Menorat ha-­ma’or), were written in Toledo, one by Isaac Aboab and the other by Israel Al-­Nakawa. Both compilations combined ethical and homiletical subjects (e.g., how to avoid jealousy and live peacefully with others) with discussions of the commandments related to marriage, festivals, raising

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children, and respect for one’s parents. Like Abudraham, these authors drew on the vast corpus of Jewish learning, distilling it in a way they hoped would appeal to Jews with little interest in abstract, scholarly debates.86 These pastoral efforts mark a significant development in the relationship between the Jewish community and its religious leaders. Others sought to engage Jewish audiences by abridging some of the great legal compendia of the day to produce halakhic manuals that were less cumbersome and intimidating. Samuel ben Zadok ibn Shoshan, who set out to write a condensed version of Jacob ben Asher’s great legal code The Four Rows (Arba’ah Turim), explained his motivation in the preface to his abridgment to one section (Orach Hayim): “We know the nature of man: when he sees a large book, ‘he glances and is injured’ whereas he reaches eagerly for the short book, and ‘he enters in peace and exits in peace.’ . . . And perhaps precisely because the book is short, one will pick it up, which will lead to its being read, which will then result in action. And so, we may learn that verbosity leads to limited impact and brevity to a longer-­lasting effect. Therefore, a person who abridges a lengthy work brings it closer to implementation, and to accomplishing what its author wished to achieve.”87 Jacob ben Asher had created the Arba’ah Turim as a synthesis of Ashkenazi and Sephardic halakhic traditions, and it was immediately accepted in Spain as a landmark in Jewish legal scholarship. Nevertheless, Ibn Shoshan quickly recognized the challenge it posed to the average Jew who sought to adhere to halakhah but had neither the time nor the inclination to pore over dense academic tomes. His digest represents a new willingness of certain rabbis to close the gap between these two sectors of Jewish society. The awareness of two distinct readerships for halakhic compositions can also be seen in the works of Yeruham ben Meshullam, a refugee from Provence who lived and studied in Toledo for much of his career. Yeruham produced two different codes of Jewish law: the Book of Uprightness (Sefer Meisharim) and The Tale of Adam and Eve (Toldot Adam ve-­Hava). The first, covering civil law, was a typical scholarly work intended for the study house and for use by learned judges. However, his Tale of Adam and Eve covered matters of religious law and was written for both scholarly and lay audiences.88 It should be noted that popular religious expression in Spain also included the activity of Jewish women. In addition to overseeing religious life within the Jewish home, women were also public figures in Jewish family and communal ceremonies. They played an important part in Jewish funeral processions by singing, playing drums, and clapping their hands. Jewish

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women sang and performed songs of mourning (endechas) at funerals and other death-­related ceremonies and were so popular that they were hired as professional mourners at Christian funerals as well. When the great legal authority Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet was asked if this practice violated the Talmudic prohibition of kol ishah (hearing the voice of women in a liturgical setting), he ruled that the custom was permissible since it was done to honor the deceased. While potentially problematic from the point of view of legal reasoning, Perfet’s response can once again be seen as a scholar’s acknowledgment of the difficulties in overturning popular religious customs. Jewish women would also celebrate the ceremony of hadas on the day or the eve before a boy’s circumcision with songs and dances in the private chamber of the new mother. Women were regular participants in synagogue life as well, and wealthier families owned seats for both men and women in the respective men’s and women’s sections of their synagogues. And in at least some communities, Jews maintained a custom of having the Scroll of Esther read separately to women on the holiday of Purim, a tradition that developed despite the protestations of the rabbinic elite.89 Jewish women were also well known as experts in magic spells, an area that straddled the boundaries between medicine and religion. A church document from 1303 records that a certain Jewish woman, Na Hanon, and her daughter attended a large Christian clientele in the parish of Santa Maria del Pi in Barcelona. The two women were known as experts in various magical interventions meant to increase fertility or ward off health problems, and their popularity among local Christian women prompted the interest, and alarm, of the local bishop.90 The bishop’s apprehension, it seems, was not shared by most Christians and Jews, for whom Jewish knowledge of magic was as accepted, and respected, as their command of more “rational” medical knowledge. Indeed, the clear distinctions among normative religion, practical magic, and medical science that exist today were often blurred in the later Middle Ages, to the extent that they existed at all. To become licensed, physicians had to prove mastery of astrology and metaphysics, as well as physics and the “art” of medicine.91 An anonymous Hebrew treatise entitled The Book of Women’s Love (Sefer Ahavat Nashim) illustrates the close relationship between medicine and magic. The book contained an extended section on love potions and spells, as well as sections on gynecology and obstetrics. Love potions and other magical methods were employed to gain the affections of potential spouses and to ensure happy marriages, but Jews did not seem to consider such practices to be at odds with the dictates of

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Judaism.92 By the late thirteenth century, the association of Jews with sorcery and dark magic was a well-­known trope in Christian theological polemics. This does not mean that Jews engaged in more magic than did their Muslim or Christian neighbors, or that such practices were wholly rejected by Christian authorities. On the contrary, the use of spells, amulets, and potions were widely considered to be acceptable religious practices throughout medieval society, with important caveats as to the limits of each. Jews could be brought up on charges of using forbidden arts of divination, but they could also be, and were, pardoned by the crown. The question of Jewish divination was yet another source for jurisdictional conflicts between church and state—each asserting that they had the rights to punish (or protect) Jews in this regard. No less a scholar than Nahmanides, the premier rabbinic authority of his day and a prominent physician, prescribed the wearing of talismans as a means of harnessing astral magic for medical purposes. Most noteworthy was the practice of wearing a coin with a figure of a lion on it to ward off kidney disease. Here it seems Nahmanides was drawing on magical/medical theories that were embraced by scholars of all religious communities. Indeed leading Christian physicians associated with the great school of medicine at Montpellier, such as Arnau de Vilanova, also accepted the efficacy of this practice. Nahmanides’ student, Ibn Adret, approved of such customs, albeit with some reservations. Ibn Adret cautioned that any medical practice that also involved incense should be forbidden due to its association with idolatry, but the use of amulets as a means of warding off ill health through astral power was deemed respectable. The issue was debated by religious scholars, and Ibn Adret engaged in a protracted legal dispute with the rabbis of Montpellier about the permissibility of using talismans of various kinds for medical purposes. From the point of view of Jewish scholarship, the debate reflects the nexus of various intellectual traditions—from the kabbalistic notion of theurgy to the continued influence of Aristotelian physics—in rabbinic discussions of permitted and forbidden medical treatments. From the point of view of popular religious practice, these discussions indicate a culture in which the use of practical magic was widespread. Indeed, a Jewish grave from the time of the Black Death has been found containing a necklace with a number of such charms, presumably to ward off the plague.93 In times of such epidemics, as well as in moments of personal medical crisis, medieval people saw talismans, spells, and other magical cures to be legitimate and effective means of accessing the healing power of the divine realm. One such example comes from Valencia, where a certain Jew, Jucef Façan,

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took his sick daughter to the castle of Sagunto because it was a place where sorcerers and other curanderos of all three religions could be found.94

* * * In attempting to trace the history of the Jews of Spain as a group, we must recognize that Jewish society included a fairly wide spectrum of conditions and experiences. Any portrait of medieval Jewish life that depicts it as being organized into neat, internally cohesive communities that presented a unified front to a generally hostile Christian (or Muslim) world is fundamentally misleading. Jewish communities remained a complex composite of classes, factions, and clans, each seeking to defend and enhance its position within the aljama. As noted, Jews were quick to involve their Christian neighbors toward their achievement of these ends, whether it was the king or royal bailiff or a gang of street thugs. Indeed what is perhaps most striking about Jewish society at this time was how similar it was to its surrounding societies. The corruption, the rivalries, the financial self-­interest, and the quest for honor, as well as the deeply felt piety and pursuit of meaningful community, were as characteristic of Jewish society in Spain as they were of any other society in the medieval world.

CHAPTER 5

Death and Taxes Riots, Plague, and Debt in the Mid-­Fourteenth Century

The previous chapter surveyed the variety and complexity of Jewish life as it developed over the course of the fourteenth century with little direct reference to the period’s most infamous and devastating events. The decision to first establish a sense of the internal dynamics of Jewish society during this tumultuous period was intentional. It is only against this textured background of Jewish life that the impact of the cataclysmic events of the fourteenth century can be properly understood. The following chapter will take up the subjects of warfare, plague, and economic decline to gain an appreciation for the challenges confronting Spain’s Jews at this time. The fourteenth century has been described as “calamitous”—an era in which the Black Death was only one of several tragedies that conspired to upend much of European civilization. For the Jews of Spain, this dire epitaph is particularly appropriate. The bubonic plague, which first made its terrible presence known in the Iberian Peninsula in 1348, came amid a series of disastrous wars being waged within, and between, the crowns of Aragon and Castile. These calamities exacted a heavy toll on Spanish society, including on its Jews, who also suffered from outbreaks of violence that blended religious antagonism with economic and political frustrations on the part of the Christian populace. As with so many factors in Jewish life, the precise unfolding of these events varied greatly from one region to the next. And, it should be cautioned, these hardships should not be seen as part of an inexorable march toward expulsion. Rather they reflected the general precariousness of Jewish life, in particular how Jews’ fortunes were bound up with their position as protected subjects of the crown. Christian attitudes toward their Jewish neighbors were shaped by the relationship of the Jews to the crown,

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and by how that relationship could disadvantage Christians, particularly with regard to debt. As the general economic situation deteriorated and Christian indebtedness grew, so too did agitation against their Jewish neighbors. Many Christians considered Jews to be unfairly favored by the crown, and to be direct instruments of their economic misery. Jewish fortunes thus rose and fell with the general political stability of the realm. In Castile the crown continued to direct its energies toward the conquest of Muslim territories but was increasingly bogged down in political challenges from the aristocracy and the towns, as well as in territorial battles—both diplomatic and military—with the Crown of Aragon. The latter was as much concerned with advancing its political interests throughout the Mediterranean as it was with peninsular conquests. King Pere IV (r. 1336–87), whose long reign dominated Aragonese political life in the fourteenth century, spent a fortune fighting political rebellions at home and abroad to which the Jews were forced to make repeated financial contributions. Nor did the Jews’ extraordinary payments to the royal treasury guarantee royal protection. During the central decades of the fourteenth century, plague, fiscal mismanagement, and a series of wars eroded both the general economic situation and the royal ability to keep the peace, leading to the most harrowing period in the history of Spanish Jewry since the Almohad persecutions of the twelfth century. While anti-­ Jewish policies were rare, and most kings continued to show little interest in restricting Jewish rights, royal recognition of popular hostility toward the Jews represented an ominous development.

Early Rumblings from Abroad To the modern observer it is easy to point out several disturbing developments for the Jews over the course of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Missionary activity increased, complete with sermons forcibly delivered to Jews in their synagogues—in front of crowds of Christian onlookers. Jewish participation in royal government was curtailed from the 1280s onward, and tirades against Jewish greed, perfidy, and depredation of Christian society through unscrupulous business practices became a fixture of parliamentary assemblies, particularly in Castile. Yet Jews who lived then did not necessarily consider themselves to be experiencing a period of unrelenting decline. Their economic activities remained quite diversified, many continued to amass considerable fortunes, and still others were able to take advantage

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of a relatively high degree of both geographic and social mobility. And, as we have seen, their religious and intellectual lives were full and productive, and the great rabbinic centers of Toledo and Barcelona continued to attract Jewish scholars from far and wide. Indeed, following the expulsions of the Jews from England (1290) and France (1306, 1394), and the smaller expulsions and widespread attacks on Jews in various regions of the Holy Roman Empire, Spanish Jews would have seen their communities as relatively stable and prosperous in comparison.1 As refugees from these countries streamed into the Spanish communities during the early fourteenth century, many Jews, especially in the Crown of Aragon, recognized that their lot could be much worse. The problem of dealing with larger numbers of Jewish refugees represents a longstanding theme in medieval Jewish history. Small numbers of merchants could and did travel with ease among Jewish communities, residing in new cities for varying lengths of time and often resettling far from their native lands. Such mobility was valued by Jews, who understood it was part of an important system of communication and commerce. Christian lords often saw these newcomers as economic catalysts and willingly granted them safe-­passage and settlement rights. Larger numbers of impoverished refugees, on the other hand, were not always so warmly met by Christian rulers. Similarly, Jewish communities could be less than fully welcoming; they had to support and find space for the refugees. As well as being a financial burden, newcomers might jeopardize the good, but still fragile, relationship Spanish Jews had with the surrounding Christian society. That said, the integration of Provençal Jews into Hispano-­Jewish society was aided by more than a century of bonds that had been forged by Jewish merchants and intellectuals traveling frequently among the cities of Languedoc, Roussillon, Catalonia, and Mallorca. Provençal Jews had maintained strong ties to the Jewish communities south of the Pyrenees, and the important Jewish center of Perpignan was a part of the Crown of Aragon for much of the High Middle Ages. It is no surprise that, during the many disturbances and expulsions that rocked southern French Jewry at this time, Catalonia and the wider territories of the Crown of Aragon became major destinations for Jewish refugees. Yet despite Provençal Jews’ longstanding ties to the region and their similar language and culture, their integration into the kehillot of Spain was not easy. Those who sought safe haven in the Crown of Aragon were met with the typical problems of the refugee: overcrowding, difficulty finding work, and the hostility of the local Christian populations that were not

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pleased to welcome the arrival of so many foreigners, especially Jews. And, as would be the case for the Spanish Jews who were expelled in 1492, some French Jews would accept the royal invitation to return to their native land. The dispossessed often arrived penniless, and their rights to settle in Aragon had to be purchased for them by the local aljamas. Cultural integration was also a challenge. As noted in the previous chapter, communal politics were already tumultuous, with various socioeconomic groups quick to resist the influence of their governing councils. The refugees who came to settle among these contentious factions formed their own separate groups whenever possible. In Barcelona, for instance, the French refugees maintained their own synagogue, known as the Sinagoga dels Francesos or Scola Gallorum.2 For Jewish refugees the sense of displacement was keenly felt. Modern historians have tended to focus on the expulsions of medieval Jews from the point of view of interfaith relations, seeking to understand them as part of a broader narrative of persecution and tolerance.3 By contrast, medieval writers tended to respond to moments of communal tragedy with more personal sentiments. Expulsion was the collapse of everything they had once known and valued. It was the end of stability and security, and the mother of endless hardships. Nearly all medieval Jewish chroniclers of expulsions were intellectuals: poets, philosophers, and rabbinic scholars. It is thus not surprising that most of their accounts include laments over the disruption of Torah study, the dispersal of scholarly communities, and the estrangement of teachers and students, severing the sacred chain of Jewish knowledge. Such accounts rarely place these events in a larger contemporary framework, lamenting the destruction of one community but chronicling the new ones they joined and where they would continue to flourish. Rather, the loss of the communities they had known from their youth was, for many, tantamount to the loss of Jewish culture itself. The physician and translator Estori ha-­Parhi was a young man of twenty-­six when he was forced to leave his native Montpellier. He made his way to Barcelona, where he flourished yet never truly felt at home. In the introduction to his Hebrew translation of Armengaud Blaise’s Tabula Antidotarii, he mentions finishing the work “in Barcelona in the year of my slavery, at the beginning of my new exile.”4 As he describes in the introduction to another work, it was not until he came to settle in the Land of Israel that he felt, once again, at home: “I was taken from school, stripped of my robe, and dressed in the garments of exile. In the midst of my studies, I was expelled. Naked, I left my father’s home and the land of my birth; I walked barefoot. A boy, I wandered from nation to

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nation and kingdom. I was driven to a people whose language I did not know, I found no rest [until] the King to whom peace belongs brought me into his chambers, from captivity to the Land of Beauty [i.e. the Land of Israel].”5 For those involved, the collapse of French and Provençal Jewish society in the early fourteenth century was every bit as catastrophic as that of Andalusi Jewry in the twelfth century. Their feelings of displacement and loss no doubt colored their own experiences in Spain and added yet another layer to Hispano-­Jewish society. If Iberian Jews did not fully comprehend the pain and dislocation of the French refugees, they would soon experience some of their suffering firsthand. The Christian hostility that had helped to drive the Jews from France soon followed them across the Pyrenees in the form of poorly organized bands of “crusaders” known as the Pastoureaux, or Shepherds. Setting out from northern France in May with the intention of carrying out a crusade against enemies of Christendom, the ranks of Pastoureaux quickly swelled with a mix of young boys, peasants, and opportunists. They sought out the small numbers of Jews who had recently been invited to return to France and vented their wrath on them. They soon expanded their targets to include churches, clerics, and wealthy lay Christians. Like most anti-­Jewish violence of the period, the Pastoureaux rioting was a mix of anti-­Jewish feeling, populist rebellion against established Christian authority, and the general bloodlust and greed that characterized the Shepherds was a combination that would characterize most anti-­Jewish violence of the period. By July the “crusaders” had crossed into the Crown of Aragon, ostensibly on their way to battle Muslims in Granada. They were joined by local Christians, both rich and poor, and passed through several towns without incident before they exploded on the small Aragonese village of Montclus and massacred the Jews there. News of the attacks in Aragon reached as far south as the Kingdom of Valencia, where the Jews of Morvedre petitioned the king to construct a protective wall around their quarter.6 The attack on Morvedre never came. Instead, royal authorities succeeded in stopping further destruction by the Shepherds, levied fines on those they thought guilty of atrocities or negligent of their civic duties, and granted the Jews involved tax relief, encouraging the Jews to rebuild and move on. In the end the violence wrought by the Pastoureaux and their supporters in Aragon was contained. Whether that was due to apathy or to effective royal intervention is hard to say. But the underlying religious and economic antagonism toward Jews remained.

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Although the king succeeded in stopping the first wave of the Shepherd’s Crusade, violence once again spread south across the Pyrenees the following year. Self-­proclaimed defenders of the faith descended on the Crown of Aragon and began to accuse innocent townspeople of being “enemies of Christ” and of plotting to kill the faithful. During the ensuing hysteria, a Christian in the city of Teruel was arrested for allegedly poisoning the city’s water. Under torture, the man claimed he had been paid to poison the wells by two Jewish merchants from a neighboring town. The royal bailiff attempted to protect the accused Jews, but the municipal judges found them guilty anyway, despite the fact the Christian later withdrew his confession, and that neither Jew admitted guilt, even under torture. The accused were sentenced to death, and the bailiff lodged a formal complaint, protesting not the mistreatment of the Jews but rather the judges’ infringement on his jurisdiction. In the end he was able to secure the estates of the executed Jews for the royal treasury.7 Exacerbating these tensions were Jews who had been coerced to convert to Christianity in France but who later sought to return to Judaism in Spain. In 1326 several Jews of the city of Calatayud helped one such convert return to Judaism. On discovering this news, the papal Inquisition operating in Aragon had proposed to raze two Jewish schools where they heard these nominal Christians were being instructed in Jewish texts. The crown eventually intervened to settle the dispute after royal officials in Calatayud warned that if these buildings were destroyed there would be no way of preventing the destruction of the entire Jewish quarter.8 In the wake of the arrival of the Jews from France and Provence, religious tensions in much of the Crown of Aragon remained highly charged. Facts blended with rumors, inciting outrage among the inquisitors that local Jews were aiding in the heresy of Christian neophytes. As always, royal officials sought to support the church while safeguarding Jewish rights and, perhaps more important, protecting their own jurisdiction over the Jews. Thus anti-­ Jewish attitudes often blended with Christian legal concerns and jurisdictional disputes. Such hostility rarely gave way to large-­scale violence. When it did, we see how royal protection, while vital, was not an infallible defense against the fury of the mob. In early March 1328, anti-­Jewish riots broke out in the Navarrese town of Estella and spread to nearly all the surrounding communities in that kingdom (Funes, San Adrián, Viana, Pamplona, and Tudela).9 The Jewish scholar Menahem ibn Zerah, who lost his family in the riots, offered a harrowing account of his own experience:

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The common people rose up and plotted together to forcibly convert, kill, and destroy all of the Jews who were in their kingdom [of Navarre]. In Estella, and in the other places of the land, about six thousand Jews were killed and my master, my father, and my lady, my mother, and four of my younger brothers sanctified the Lord, and were killed for the sake of the unification of the [divine] Name,10 may the Lord avenge their blood. Only I escaped from the house of my father, by myself, beaten and stricken by God, and afflicted, for twenty-­five evil men beat me and injured me and I was thrown naked among the dead from the dusk to midnight, on the twenty-­third of the month of Adar. At midnight, a knight, who knew the house of my master my father came along and pulled me out from among the dead, and he brought me to his house, and he showed me mercy.11 Ibn Zerah does not mention any potential motivation for the riots, which he characterized as mob violence by “the common people” who only sought to attack the Jews. His account of being rescued and given shelter by a Christian knight who was an acquaintance of his father helps broaden the scene somewhat and echoes accounts of similar riots in which the hostility of angry mobs contrasted with individual Christian attempts to defend their Jewish neighbors and to uphold law and order. The riots of 1328 are often seen as the last violent manifestation of the spirit of the Pastoureaux movement, a branch of which appears to have fomented anti-­Jewish attacks in Tudela in 1320. But the attacks on the Jews of Navarre were in fact the result of a combination of factors, most notably the lack of a strong royal presence. King Charles IV, ruler of France and Navarre, had died in early February, and his niece and successor, Joan II, was not crowned until March 5. Christian preachers, like the Franciscan friar Pedro de Ollogoyen, took advantage of the interregnum to whip up the populace with anti-­Jewish sermons in the weeks leading up to Easter.12 Anti-­Jewish violence in Navarre thus points to the corrosive effects of popular religious sentiment against the Jews, and the way in which it could be combined with political instability and popular anger at royal authority to a terrifying effect. These riots also point to the danger that the Christian holiday of Semana Santa posed to Jewish life and property every year. Throughout Christian Iberia, Holy Week celebrations had come to be characterized by an almost ritualized assault on local Jewish quarters, a performative release of simmering hostility that simultaneously played a role in the celebrants’ expiation of

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their sins. Municipal officials sometimes attempted to prevent the violence but often gave up on controlling the crowds and simply waited for the attacks to run their course. One of the worst outbreaks took place in Girona during Semana Santa of 1331, just three years after the riots in Navarre. As had been the case in Navarre and in the massacre at Montclus, the Holy Week violence in Girona resulted from a mix of popular frustrations and fears, fiscal and political as well as religious. Indeed, after assaulting the Jewish quarter, killing several Jews and inflicting a huge amount of damage, the mob then threatened to turn on the city’s bailiff as he attempted to restore order.13 Such was the state of Jewish-­Christian relations in the first part of the fourteenth century. The general modus vivendi, long established between the two communities, remained in place but was occasionally broken by bouts of violence. These, however, were geographically limited and typically ended with the reassertion of royal power. They played on the grievances of the poor and disenfranchised, but often involved members of the other social classes as well. They do not seem to represent a new paradigm in Jewish-­Christian relations per se, but rather underscored the precariousness of Jewish life in general. Nevertheless, it bears noting that such outbreaks of violence, episodic though they may have been, could still be economically, socially, and psychologically devasting for the victims.

Civil War in Aragon The middle decades of the fourteenth century were dark ones for the social, economic, and legal status of the Jews, and for Castilian and Catalonian-­ Aragonese society in general. In Catalonia, perhaps the most densely populated region of Christian Iberia, 1333 became known as “the first bad year” due to the widespread scarcity of food. Throughout the Crown of Aragon, famines returned again in 1339, 1343, and 1347, which was dubbed “the year of great hunger.” In the 1340s the Crown of Aragon descended into civil unrest as a coalition of aristocratic and municipal forces that had sought to limit the political power of the crown since the late thirteenth century now erupted into open revolt. The civil war, or “Revolt of the Unions,” as it became known, hinged on dynastic struggles within the royal family. Count Jaume of Urgell, the younger brother of King Pere IV, led a group of disgruntled nobles and cities in open rebellion against the crown. Pere IV had no male heir, and so named his daughter, Constança, as his successor. Jaume saw this as a chance

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to press his own claims to the throne, and the unionist forces were able to defeat Pere in Valencia. But the rebellious count died suddenly in November 1347, and in May of the following year the Black Death arrived in Valencia, where Pere was being held captive, sowing chaos among the unionist ranks. The king was then able to escape back to Aragon, where he raised an army and defeated the rebels. The Jews had no direct part in the war but suffered nonetheless as they found themselves caught between feuding Christian factions. In Valencia in particular, the Jews were seen as associates of the crown and of certain local Christian families who also supported the royalist cause. Thus the attack on the Jews of Morvedre, the second largest aljama in Valencia, may have coincided with the first outbreak of the Black Death in 1348 but was primarily an indirect effect of the civil war. Castilian troops also occupied the Aragonese cities of Tarazona, Teruel, and Calatayud, each home to an important Jewish community. These suffered directly from the war, as did several Jewish settlements in southern Valencia, another major battleground. In those Aragonese towns that bore the brunt of the Castilian invasion, such as Tarazona, synagogues were destroyed and not rebuilt for a decade. At the same time most other Jewish communities were spared the destruction caused by battles, sieges, and occupation.14

The Black Death The civil war in Aragon was cut short by the appearance of an enemy with which no army could contend. Even during a period characterized by multiple calamities, the Black Death stands out as particularly devastating.15 The epidemic, which raged throughout the Middle East and Europe from 1346 to 1351, left a confused and frightened populace in its wake. Some regions lost as much as a quarter to a third of the entire population; whole villages were wiped out in a matter of weeks. In Spain the plague first appeared in the spring of 1348 and returned in 1362 and then again in 1384. Exact numbers of the dead elude us, but an abundance of information from the period reveals widespread devastation. The plague wreaked havoc on the political and economic institutions in nearly every city and town that housed a significant Jewish population. Even in the Kingdom of Aragon, which was more sparsely populated than neighboring Catalonia, and where the impact of the plague was less intense, the population of its second largest city, Calatayud, was reduced by more than a third.16 In the words of a contemporary Jewish

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writer: “[God] brought misfortune upon most of the world’s population and they were inflicted with unusual sicknesses which cannot be explained naturally. . . We actually saw with our own eyes how this plague spread extensively during that year to such a degree that the world’s population changed in that year alone more than it had changed during the previous two hundred years.”17 Along with the massive death toll from the disease came outbreaks of violence, the main object of which were Europe’s Jewish communities. In Spain the Jews were spared the levels of persecution and abuse suffered by their coreligionists in other regions in Europe, where they were blamed for spreading the pestilence. Nonetheless, the collapse of social institutions in Catalonia did prompt attacks on several of its leading Jewish aljamas. The Black Death first arrived in Barcelona in the spring of 1348 and was signaled by a rapid rate of mortality. Within the first few months, thousands of people died, many of whom were members of the city’s administrative body. As its political and judicial infrastructure began to collapse, Barcelona was left in the hands of angry and panicked mobs. On May 17 the city erupted into violence, signaling the beginning of a period of anarchy and bloodshed that would last for two years, spreading throughout the towns and cities of Catalonia. According to an account of the incident sent to King Pere, the trouble began during a funeral for victims of the plague. As the procession wound its way to the plaza of St. Jaume, which bordered the Jewish quarter, someone in the funeral party began to shout disparaging remarks, and the familiar rallying cry of “muyren los traydors” (“kill the traitors!”) rang out as the mob set upon the hapless Jews. Soon the mourners were joined by street rabble and other passersby, as the mob turned its wrath on the Jewish quarter, leaving scores of people dead and a great many homes and buildings sacked or razed to the ground. The riot was finally checked by the intervention of the forces of the town council and the bishop, but the violence had begun.18 Elsewhere in Europe the Jews were accused of deliberately spreading the plague by poisoning wells. The initial response in Spain, however, was not to blame the Jews. This absence of accusations is particularly interesting since, shortly before the plague struck his kingdom, King Pere IV had received a notice of warning written by the governor of Roussillon and Cerdanya, who theorized that the plague was spread by a poisonous powder that was sprinkled on “the benches on which men sit and put up their feet.” Similarly, municipal officials in Girona also received advance notice about the epidemic from officials in Narbonne and Carcassonne. They noted that it was spread by “many beggars and mendicants of various countries,” who were said to be

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carrying “powdered substances which they were putting into rivers, houses, churches and foodstuffs to kill people.”19 The authorities of the Crown of Aragon were thus aware of the possibility that the disease was deliberately being spread through poison, yet it would seem they did not immediately think Jews were responsible. King Pere  IV took seriously the tales of poisoners that he had received from France, promptly writing to the governor of Mallorca and instructing him to take necessary precautions to prevent such men from entering his province. Arnau de Lupia, the lieutenant of Mallorca, responded by forbidding entrance to the city’s port to those infected with the sickness, including Jews. However, the Jews are not referred to as agents of the plague in any way. After being briefed on the various theories of the pestilence and its origins, the king arranged to have his children moved from Tarragona to Montblanc for greater safety but made no indication that he suspected the Jews of foul play. Indeed, after finding a safe place to stay, Pere turned to a Jewish physician for advice about the epidemic. That rumors of Jewish well-­poisoners failed to take hold in the Crown of Aragon as they had in other parts of Europe is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that many actually suspected Christian pilgrims and clergy of just such a crime. Letters about the plague described poisoners as clerics who carried the poison hidden in the sleeves of their robes. Two clergymen passing through Barcelona during the first month of the epidemic were told that it was not safe for them to go about dressed as they were in religious garb. Likewise, Christian pilgrims returning from France were viewed with suspicion and attacked, leading one to apply for a letter of safe conduct from the king before setting out again.20 The crown’s reaction to the Black Death actually showed a great deal of pragmatism. Pere was simultaneously attempting to contain the rioting and to respond to the myriad other crises that were developing throughout the Crown of Aragon. It would have been very easy for him to have ignored the attack on the Jews, waiting until after the plague had run its course and the rebellious unionists were crushed. Instead, on hearing about the attack on the Jewish call of Barcelona, the king moved swiftly and resolutely to punish those guilty and to prevent the possibility of similar disturbances erupting in other towns. In a letter written shortly after he received news of the events in Barcelona, Pere admonished the royal and local officials in Montblanc, Vilafranca del Penedès, and Cervera against any such disturbances to take place in their towns. Foreseeing difficulties in enforcing the protection of “his Jews” in the already rebellious

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municipalities, the king assigned a royal functionary to the post of regent of Catalonia. Gilbert de Corbera, who had formerly represented the crown as governor of Mallorca, was now to head a special task force that would see to the protection of the various Jewish communities throughout Catalonia.21 As the epidemic spread, however, neither the king nor De Corbera was able to prevent anti-­Jewish violence from breaking out in a number of cities. Nonetheless, Pere remained determined to restore order as best he could, and this included defending the Jews under his protection, and punishing their assailants. In a visit to the city of Teruel in July 1348, the king received a petitioned from the Jews living there. While they felt safe at the moment, due to the presence of their sovereign and protector, the Jewish quarter had already been invaded by angry mobs on several occasions. The Jews feared renewed violence after his departure and so wished to complete and fortify the enclosure of their Jewish quarter. Pere granted their request and sent a letter to the city’s officials, reminding them that the Jews remained under royal protection. He wrote a similar letter to the officials of Lleida, proactively ordering the protection of the Jews there. Pere’s tone in these royal decrees about the attacks on the Jews displays a combination of indignation and frustration. Not only were his possessions being attacked, but Pere was finding himself unable to bring the situation under control. He made every effort to keep the violence in Barcelona and Tàrrega from spreading to other cities, sending letters to towns such as Borja and Segre and demanding that local officials take measures to protect their Jewish quarters. These, however, seem to have had little impact. The violence that came in the wake of the Black Death often continued intermittently for weeks or even months after the initial assault. After Barcelona, rioting against the Jews moved westward along the royal road to the communities of Cervera, Tàrrega, and Lleida, most likely following the spread of the plague inland. Once again fear of the pestilence mixed with simmering frustration over other factors that similarly seemed beyond their control. Among these was the nearly insuperable debt that many now owed to Jewish lenders. Jews were beaten and killed, their homes and synagogues invaded and destroyed, and loan records were torn up. In Cervera many Jews succeeded in fleeing from the riots, and were given refuge in the city’s castle for several weeks by the bailiff and his men. Finally thinking it safe to go back to what remained of the Jewish quarter, a group of returning Jews were promptly set upon by a band of armed men. At least one member of the Jewish party, Jucef Falcoquera, died from sword wounds inflicted in this assault.

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The bailiff duly reported the incident to the king, who in turn issued an edict for the arrest of Pere Blanch, the accused assailant. The legal process against Blanch illustrates vividly the difficulties involved in trying to mete out justice in such incidents. Like many other fourteenth-­century monarchs, Pere could not always ensure that punitive measures were carried out swiftly and efficiently, even in the best of times. Now, contending with a civil war that had divided the populace and an epidemic that was killing off notaries, judges, and other members of his civil administration by the score, the king found prosecution to be nearly impossible. The case against Blanch was meant to mollify members of Cervera’s Jewish community and serve as a warning against other would-­be rioters. The result, however, was quite the opposite. The prosecution of Blanch soon widened to include several other assailants, making it even harder to process the case. The plague-­decimated judicial system stalled completely, forcing the king to send letter after letter assigning new officials to the case and admonishing them to proceed with alacrity. By June 1351 Pere was still trying to bring the case to trial. Finally, he sent another jurist, Arnau Calvert, to decide the case once and for all, either by absolving or condemning those charged. Another obstacle to royal efforts to punish these attacks was that the punishments themselves were often difficult to implement. The most common sentence assigned in such cases was a fine to be paid to the Jewish aljama as restitution for the physical damage. Yet both the economy and the usual methods for collecting fines had been seriously disrupted by the plague. Ramon Folquet, a man-­at-­arms, for example, was found guilty of violent crimes in Tàrrega. He was sentenced to two years of exile from Catalonia and fined five thousand sueldos. However, his sentence was excused after only a month’s banishment and without his having paid any of the fine. No further legal action was taken against him, and the Jews of Tàrrega were left to pay for the damages themselves.22 The rioting that took place in Tàrrega deserves special attention in that it represents one of the most destructive outbreaks during this period. Although the violence began, as in other areas, with a spontaneous attack on the Jewish quarter, it soon extended to include the entire city. Tàrrega broke into warring bands, with some factions loyal to the crown and others to the rebels. Pere attempted to find and punish those guilty of starting the violence, and the situation continued to deteriorate. It was discovered that Pere Aguilo, together with some city officials, had led the attack on the Jews. Gilbert de Corbera, acting as the newly appointed regent for Catalonia, sought to

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restore order, but soon found himself confronted with the problem of having to arrest men whose power in Tàrrega rivaled his own. Whether out of caution, sympathy, or mere ineffectuality, De Corbera was unwilling or unable to fulfill his mandate. Instead, the defendants, plaintiffs, and their improvised gangs fought out a mini civil war on the streets of the city. In a further attempt to pacify the various groups involved and restore order, the king responded in October 1348 by ordering that three impartial men be chosen to establish a provisional government. Still, as late as 1350 little progress had been made in punishing those guilty of attacking the call, prompting yet another royal decree in April. This time Pere appealed to the bailiff to appoint a new set of four impartial officers to decide the case. Such measures were, however, more hopeful than realistic. Throughout most of Catalonia during this period, Pere was unable to establish order. Only after events had played themselves out did life return to something resembling normalcy. The fusion of anti-­Jewish violence and the larger rebellion against royal authority is noteworthy. Even though the king’s official position was that the Jews must be defended, such sentiments were not shared by those who otherwise remained loyal to him. On the contrary, the worst attacks on the Jews took place in the pro-­monarchy towns of Catalonia, while in those towns where antiroyalist forces were in control no Jews were attacked. This paradoxical situation is particularly apparent in the case of Tàrrega, where the attack on the Jewish call was led by the bailiff himself, the royal official supposed to keep the peace in the city.  As 1348 came to a close, an uneasy peace was established in the cities of Catalonia. Throughout the Crown of Aragon, plague-­ravaged communities attempted to regroup as the spread of the disease abated with the coming of winter. When the date of Holy Thursday (the beginning of Semana Santa) was established in February 1349, the king sent word to the city councils and legists in various municipalities to keep the Jews in their quarters and guard them throughout Semana Santa. That same day, he sent a letter to De Corbera expressing his disgust at the slow and inefficient nature of the legal proceedings against those accused of inciting the riots, particularly in Barcelona, where they had originated and where not one of the accused had yet been successfully brought to trial and punished. The king issued a final order to prosecute without further delay, but this too proved fruitless. Exasperated with De Corbera’s ineffectiveness in this area, the king removed him from his post in favor of a former court advisor, Atarn de Tallarn, and appointed special judges to preside over cases dealing with assaults on the Jews.23

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The details surrounding the anti-­Jewish violence of the plague years are instructive. In contrast to other regions of Europe, where the Jews were blamed for purposely spreading the epidemic, the rioting against the Jews in Spain owed more to the breakdown in law and order than to any theories of Jewish malevolence. There is little to no evidence of popular scapegoating of the Jews in Castile regarding the plague, and even in the Crown of Aragon violence was geographically limited and targeted Christians groups as well. Coming as it did in the middle of a civil war, the Black Death served to exacerbate tensions between various sectors of Christian society. The authorities had been unable to prevent or even adequately explain the reasons behind the pestilence, and the frightened masses lashed out at officials everywhere. In 1350 in the city of Valencia, the crowd attacked and killed a Christian man-­ at-­arms who, on royal orders, was involved in defending the Jewish quarter. There is also repeated evidence of violence being directed at members of the church. On Christmas Day 1348, an armed soldier broke into the bishop’s palace of Barcelona, robbing it and threatening the life of a priest there. In the city of Saragossa, angry mobs assaulted the archbishop in March 1351. Other incidents of attacks, robberies, and kidnappings of members of the clergy throughout the Crown of Aragon during this period indicate a general breakdown of civic authority. Likewise, for much of the fourteenth century, violence among various sectors of Hispano-­Christian society was more common than between Christians and Jews. Popular uprisings in Córdoba, Seville, and Segovia were all directed at the caballeros villanos and royal officials, not the Jews.24

Jewish Responses to the Black Death It is easy to forget that the greatest impact of the Black Death on Jewish society was the disease itself. Jews died along with their neighbors. In Barcelona and Girona new Jewish cemeteries needed to be established as the old ones reached their capacity, not all of which was due to violence.25 As noted earlier, the practice of medicine was popular among the Jews of late medieval Spain, and several Jewish physicians wrote or translated treatises on the Black Death. Some were written in Arabic, most in Hebrew, and others were translated from Arabic and Latin into Hebrew and Judeo-­Spanish—a Romance vernacular rendered in Hebrew characters. Abraham Caslari, a leading Jewish physician in the Crown of Aragon, composed his Treatise on Pestilential

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Fevers and Other Kinds of Fevers immediately following the first major outbreak of the plague in 1348. Like many of his colleagues, he characterized the disease as a unique and severe form of fever: “My heart awakened me to write this treatise because of what happened in the summer and the late spring. Fevers overcame the entire province and all of Catalonia and Aragon, and there was no city which was safe from the fevers. . . . And those fevers were lethal; they would not pass away for ten days and many would die of them; and the fevers were incessant, with much fainting and distress.”26 The Black Death was also responsible for financial losses and economic dislocation. Jews abandoned their home communities and sought security elsewhere, further disrupting an already chaotic situation. Jucef Samarell of Cervera immigrated to Lleida and was allowed to stay there. A royal letter in 1354 excused him from paying back taxes in his former city, as he had instead paid them in Lleida. While the king was understanding of such emigration from besieged aljamas, he endeavored to keep such instances to a minimum, and made a special effort to keep communal leaders with their original communities. An example is that of Perfet Adret, an authority of the aljama of Tàrrega, who fled to Balaguer during the disturbances in his home city. Unable to find a suitable replacement for him and in desperate need of leadership, the beleaguered community in Tàrrega petitioned the king to intervene on their behalf. In August 1350 a letter was duly sent from the Cortes to the countess of Urgell, in whose domain Adret had taken up residence, asking that he return to his community. The letter did not work, however, and neither did the royal proclamations of 1350 and 1356, which gave Jews who had emigrated from Tàrrega and Girona thirty days to return to these cities or risk serious punishment. Both decrees were eventually revoked. These various episodes once again reflect how limited royal power was during this period.27 After a measure of calm was restored, those communities hit hard by the plague and by mob violence sought to reorganize. Jewish leaders did their best to hold things together during these turbulent times, but they also took the opportunity to assert their authority over their traditional rivals within their communities. From the time of King Jaume II (r. 1291–1327), the leaders of the various aljamas of the Crown of Aragon had been granted the right to levy a variety of direct and indirect taxes on their communities. The same monarch had also approved a series of communal statutes, or takkanot, for the community of Barcelona that abolished the granting of public offices to individuals by the crown and imposed harsh penalties on anyone attempting to obtain a position in this manner. From 1327 onward these posts were to be

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filled by a “Council of Thirty,” an imitation of the Council of One Hundred that governed Barcelona, and which would be elected from among the elite of the community. Originally developed by the kahal of Barcelona, this model of communal organization would eventually be adopted by several communities in the Crown of Aragon. It represented a shift to a more centralized and tightly managed oligarchic approach to Jewish self-­government, with positions of power being passed down from one generation to another among a small number of families.28 The decades of famine, plague, warfare, and economic ruin did little to alter Jewish communal leadership or foster greater solidarity. Courtiers and other francos continued to pursue personal wealth and status, separating them from other Jews, and local elites remained committed to preserving their power over other sectors of Jewish society. In December 1354, a small group of Jewish leaders met in Barcelona to draft a new set of communal takkanot. The meeting took place during a lull in the turmoil of the mid-­fourteenth century, three years after the devastation of the Black Death had begun to recede and two years before the outbreak of war between the crowns of Aragon and Castile. The self-­styled representatives of Aragonese, Catalonian, and Valencian Jewry were all elders of their respective communities who had lived through the threat of the Pastoureaux, the Holy Week riots of 1331, the civil war between the unionists and the crown, and the anti-­Jewish attacks of the plague years. Moses Natan of Tàrrega and Cresques Salomo were wealthy merchants and well-­known religious scholars, and Jafuda Alatzar, the head officer (parnas) of the kahal of Valencia, was the richest Jew in Valencia and a trusted familiar of the king.29 Their goal was to stabilize the political and economic status of the Jews of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia by establishing a confederacy of all the Jewish aljamas in the kingdom. They also petitioned both royal and papal authorities to openly deny accusations made against the Jews and to take steps toward the protection of the Jewish aljamas in the future.  It is clear from their opening paragraphs that the attacks suffered during the plague figured heavily as a motivating force behind the drafting of the takkanot. They begin with a plea to the king and, through his royal emissaries, to Pope Innocent VI, requesting that they be granted “a decree forbidding the masses of the Christians to fall upon the Jews whenever a natural visitation, such as a plague or a famine, occurs.”30 This section is immediately followed by one requesting a similar defense against Christian attacks stemming from accusations of host desecration as well as from attacks that took

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place during Semana Santa. Thus it seems that contemporary Jews saw the attacks suffered during the Black Death as a particularly destructive episode of a longstanding trend. The resolutions of 1354 play on the prevailing Christian theological position that the Jews should not be harmed, as judgment would be meted out by God at the time of the second coming. Until then it was the policy of the church to allow at least “a remnant” of Jews to exist. The authors of the takkanot make continual reference to these beliefs, describing any Christian who dares to attack Jews as “adding transgression to his sins,” and as “a heretic against his own faith and laws, which command that they leave us as a remnant in the land.”31 They also ask for a limitation of the power of the papal Inquisition. As noted, the influence of the Inquisition in Aragonese society was growing in the decades prior to the plague, and while officially it was forbidden to try Jews as heretics, the Inquisition repeatedly sought to extend its jurisdiction to include them. However, there is no suggestion that these Jews associated the power of the Inquisition with the attacks that took place during the time of the plague. These issues, while lamentable transgressions of the legal rights of the kingdom’s Jews, are otherwise unrelated. This first section of the takkanot closes with a passage that exemplifies the bold and decisive tone used throughout the document. It states that the Jews of the Crown of Aragon best understand their own needs for “the heart knows its own bitterness” (Proverbs 14:10), and therefore they have resolved to send representatives to both the royal and papal courts to see their demands are met. If Jewish creditors feared approaching Christians to collect their debts in the immediate aftermath of the plague riots, these Jews were not so timid. They went so far as to suggest punishments for Christians who infringed on their rights. One section advises the Aragonese Cortes to prevent asylum from being given to those found guilty of inciting violence against Jews. As for the church’s reaction to such violence, the takkanot firmly ask for the culprits to be excommunicated by the pope. They approached these authorities with confidence and openly sought reinforcement of the rights legally guaranteed to them. Thus while the Jews’ general status may very well have deteriorated, particularly with regard to the masses and the local church, there appears to have been no significant change in their relationship to the papacy and the crown.  The aim of the takkanot was ostensibly twofold: to push for the royal protection against attacks that they had already been granted, and to create a

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supracommunal governing body. This body would deal with issues such as the establishment of a collective Jewish treasury or “disaster fund” for times of economic instability. A third goal can also be detected here, however: to once again attempt to strengthen the hand of communal councilors with regard to their own communities. Thus, except for this short-­lived effort at communal cooperation, the Jewish response to the riots of the plague years was to press for the enforcement of existing legislation based on royal and ecclesiastical protection. However, despite all the energy and planning of these leaders, the “Jewish union” they set out in these resolutions ultimately failed to take shape. The inability of the aljamas to come together underscores how volatile and contentious Jewish society in Aragon was—as much so as its Christian counterpart. It also suggests that the Jews were eventually able to recover from the plague years, as was the rest of Aragon, after a relatively short time. With this recovery came the dissolution of any impetus to establish communal political and economic institutions as preventative measures. The three signatories on the takkanot of 1354 did not even have the support of the communal councils they claimed to represent. By 1370 the community of Valencia denounced the long and “despotic” career of Jafuda Alatzar and instituted a broader (if not wholly democratic) communal coalition for the governance of the city’s aljama.32 Tensions between Jewish leaders and those they sought to lead continued throughout the late fourteenth century, particularly in the Crown of Aragon. In 1383 Pere IV gave his imprimatur to sweeping legislation supporting the power of the Jewish communal councils throughout his realm. At the heart of these new regulations was the royal permission for Jewish leaders to sentence to death, mutilation, or exile anyone they deemed to be an “informer.” Malsin (informer) was a Hebrew term that had by this time become a catchall for anyone who dared defy the authority of the kahal. Royal support for Jewish governing councils mirrored the crown’s own attempts to crack down on those elements in Christian society that it deemed subversive. The new royal policy greatly strengthened the effective authority of Jewish kehalim by directly tying their decisions in these matters to the considerable executive powers of the crown. These governing councils were now empowered to kill or exile their political enemies “with or without a trial, with or without witnesses, solely on circumstantial evidence which they considered sufficient on the basis of the judgment of a Jewish ‘doctor’ or ‘doctors,’ scholars or scholars, who had reviewed this matter and handed down a decision.” Their sentences were to be executed by royal officials, without opportunity for appeal.33

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Civil War in Castile If the arrival of the Black Death brought an end to one civil war in the Crown of Aragon, its impact in Castile served as a prelude to another. King Alfonso XI died of the plague, initiating a struggle for the throne. Power vacuums always threatened Jewish safety and communal stability. Jewish status was precarious even during periods of strong and consistent royal leadership and was far less stable during times of political uncertainty. In Castile the transition from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century witnessed two royal minorities and the attendant political volatility that usually accompanied such periods. Sancho IV was only ten years old when he took the throne in 1295, and his son, Alfonso XI, became king at the age of one, in 1312. The succession was contested, and Alfonso did not effectively begin his reign until 1325. In 1350 Alfonso died of the plague as he was attempting to conquer the Muslim stronghold of Gibraltar, the only European monarch to succumb to the disease. His son and successor, Pedro I, was only sixteen when he became king, yet another minor surrounded by feuding parties. Pedro I was never able to fully overcome the fractious political climate of his minority. By 1355, while the king was still in his teens, the rebellious elements of Castile had firmly backed his half-­brother, Enrique, in what would become a long and destructive civil war. The consequent political instability caused by these events brought disaster on the kingdom’s Jews. One of the earliest salvos in the Castilian civil war was an attack on the Jews of Toledo by local Christians and Muslims who either sided with Enrique or, more likely, seized the opportunity to unleash their frustration at the crown by raiding one of the local Jewish quarters. Samuel Halevi, Pedro’s treasurer, remained loyal to his king and suffered with him, but eventually fell from grace when Pedro accused him of withholding taxes. Whether the king truly felt betrayed or simply was in desperate need of funds is not clear. Whatever Pedro’s motivation, he seized Halevi’s considerable fortune and had him taken to Seville, imprisoned, and tortured until he handed over even more money. Halevi died in prison in 1360, and Pedro ordered the arrest of other prominent Castilian Jews and their families, confiscated their wealth, and sold their properties, all in an effort to fund his campaigns against Enrique. Jewish leaders throughout Castile no doubt watched the demise of these Jewish courtiers with concern, but there is no indication that they took it as evidence of a decline in their own status. Indeed, Pedro continued to defend Jewish rights throughout Castile to the

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best of his ability, and other Jews continued to serve a variety of Christian lords throughout this period.34 Pedro’s rival, Enrique, took a very different tack. Rallying support for himself and against the king, he demonized the Jews. They were, he said, beneficiaries of and accomplices to the crown’s rapacious tax policies, and he promised to end Jewish influence at the royal court. Propaganda was soon followed by actual bloodshed, and in 1360 Enrique’s forces attacked the Jews of Nájera. Perhaps the worst violence against the Jews there was committed by French and English mercenaries in the service of both Enrique and Pedro. Enrique’s troops attacked the Jews in the town of Briviesca, northeast of Burgos, while those allied with the king killed Jews at Villadiego and Aguilar de Campóo, to the northwest. Writing toward the end of the civil war, the Castilian Jewish scholar Samuel ibn Zarza also mentioned assaults against the Jews at Ávila, Paredes, and Valladolid. While he notes that some of these attacks came at the hands of the foreign mercenaries, locals also joined in.35 Indeed, popular uprisings against the Jews continued even after the foreigners had left and Enrique ascended the throne in 1369. Another contemporary Jewish author, Menahem ibn Zerah, observed that the widespread destruction of Castilian Jews was marked by looting that left many aljamas greatly impoverished.36 Popular anger at Jews who held positions of authority easily devolved into attacks on the Jewish community in general. That most of the rank and file of Jewish society not only did not benefit from the connections that Jewish privados and tax-­collectors had with the crown but often suffered from them was a fact that was lost on most of their Christian neighbors. Enrique suffered early defeats and was exiled by Pedro I, but had returned with a vengeance in 1365 at the head of a coalition that included the kings of Aragon and France, as well as a large section of the Castilian nobility and the towns. After Pedro lost the support of his English allies, he was defeated at Montiel in March 1369, and in short order killed by Enrique himself. The new king continued to oppress his Jewish subjects, even as he once again let the crown avail itself of the service of Jewish tax-­collectors. Soon after he took power, Enrique looked to replenish the royal coffers through extraordinary taxes levied on the Jews. He forced the Jews of Toledo to pay 20,000 gold doblas through torture and starvation, and threats of similar tactics were used to force Jews to pay large sums in Burgos and Palencia as well.37 Such massive levies created serious and longstanding economic problems for Spanish Jews. Even among the various calamites of the fourteenth

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century, the exorbitant demands on the Jewish communities by their rulers cannot be overestimated.

Taxes, Debts, and Economic Collapse The Jewish communities of both Castile and Aragon bore a great deal of the financial burden for royal military expeditions. Fighting Muslims in Granada, Genoese in the Mediterranean, and rebellious nobles at home, the kings of Castile and Aragon also went to war with each other. Castile allied itself with Portugal and Navarre and attacked Aragon along its western border. Pere IV, whose royal coffers were already depleted from fighting Sardinian rebels and their Genoese backers in the Mediterranean, was now forced to appeal for more financial support from the Corts. The war between Pedro of Castile and Pere IV of Catalonia-­Aragon, known as the “War of the Two Peters,” took place from 1356 to 1369 and officially ended with the Peace of Almazán in 1375. It was ruinous, especially for Aragon, and left large areas along the frontier with Castile depopulated and economically depressed. The process of resettlement (repoblación) that had taken decades to achieve following the conquest of Muslim lands in the south was now needed in the north. And as had been the case throughout the wars of “reconquest,” the crown once again called on the Jews to help reestablish a functioning economy in these abandoned and depressed areas. The situation was not much better in Castile where, in the middle of the war between the two kingdoms, Henry Trastámara dethroned Peter I. The ensuing Castilian civil war lasted until 1369. When relations between the Crown of Aragon and Castile were good, Jewish merchants, moneylenders, and artisans passed easily between the two rival kingdoms. At times the kings encouraged Jews from across the border to come to their territories, not only to trade but to settle and to act as agents of economic development in underpopulated and underdeveloped regions. But peaceful relations between Aragon and Castile never lasted too long, and during periods of tension or outright war, Jews would be forced to choose sides. For many Castilian Jews who had come to settle in Aragonese-­ controlled Valencia, hostility between the two kingdoms meant they had to return to Castilian territory. For some this would mean returning home, while for others it meant moving farther south to the Castilian-­controlled parts of Murcia, a frontier territory that, by the early fourteenth century, had been split between Aragon and Castile. Throughout the War of the Two

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Peters, Jews found themselves caught between the feuding kingdoms. Those in the besieged cities of Aragon and Valencia suffered along with their Christian and Muslim neighbors, exacerbating the economic problems caused by the Black Death, exorbitant taxation, and unpaid debts. Jews also served the kings as diplomats and commercial agents. King Pedro of Castile sought to entice some Jews to switch allegiances, as was the case with a certain Gento de Narbona. Pedro promised to reimburse the Jewish merchant for the goods the latter had lost during the war, but Gento refused the offer, choosing to stay loyal to his Aragonese king and moving to Saragossa to be closer to his lord.38 The feuding kings saw certain Jews as potential sources of aid, and Jews approached the question of which lords to serve with a mix of loyalty and caution. The majority of Jewish society, in contrast, could do little more than wait for the storm of warfare and destruction to pass. By the time the war broke out between Aragon and Castile, many Jewish communities were already struggling economically. Pere IV was as supportive to his Jews as any monarch before him, but patronage came at a high financial cost. The king’s involvement in wars in Sicily, Mallorca, Italy, and Greece, as well as his need to contend with rebellious nobles at home, were a constant drain on the royal treasury. Pere sought financial contributions from all his subjects but turned most often to his Jews. The Jewish communities, for their part, had already endured years of extraordinary taxes, on top of the devastation wrought by the Black Death. Pere’s war with Castile dragged on for more than a decade, and the financial demands made on the Jewish communities during that time brought many to the brink of ruin. The course of the war was particularly devastating for the Jews of the Kingdom of Valencia, where much of the fighting took place. In Xàtiva leaders of the aljama avoided total financial collapse only when they were able to convince Queen Leonor to forgive several large debts they had incurred from extraordinary taxes. For Jews who lived through this harrowing period, taxation represented a serious problem with even more concerning long-­term consequences. To be sure, being tied directly to the crown as servants of the royal fisc had always had its advantages and disadvantages. As the highest office in the land, the king was in a better position to enforce Jewish rights than other lords. Respect for kings also fit well within the Jews’ religious and legal worldview, and medieval rabbis regularly went out of their way to praise “just kings” for protecting Jewish subjects. Even in the best of times, however, Jews could not rely solely on the crown for their safety or for help in collecting debts. Jews developed strong relationships with other lords. Legal experts pointed out that Jews should think

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of local lords as “kings” within their own territories, for they functioned as such. But maintaining good relations with so many lords, royal officials, and municipal councils did not come cheap. As the kings of both Aragon and Castile turned to extraordinary taxation and forced loans from their subjects to solve their financial problems, a disproportionate part of this burden was laid on the Jews. Beginning in the late 1350s, Pere IV imposed a hearth tax (fogaje) on his subjects, which was just one part of a constellation of royal taxes of various kinds that were levied on Jewish communities. In addition aljamas also had to pay extra protection money to local officials, especially at times when the defense offered by the crown proved weak or insufficient. The cost of protection varied from community to community, but the accumulated total was often considerable. Jewish officials regularly paid extra to repair physical defenses to the Jewish quarters, such as gates or walls, or to litigate for reimbursement from those who caused such damages. They paid for extra guards during Holy Week, and made regular “gifts” to municipal, royal, and ecclesiastical officials in the hopes the latter would be more willing to carry out the protection they had promised.39 The kahal passed these costs on to the rest of the community, to which it added its own taxes on income, rents, commerce, and food. It, too, often failed to provide the social and religious services for which it collected contributions. The poor had to do without such services, and wealthier members of the community had to pay, yet again, to Christian officials or to local Jewish confraternities for protection, education, or support should they become ill, and so forth. The situation was not much different in Castile, where aljamas routinely made extraordinary payments (servicios) to the king in addition to their regular taxes, many of which were little more than bribes for protection and for royal support in collecting debts from Christians. Yet despite these financial contributions, the king often sided with the Christian concejos who also represented a much-­needed source of fiscal support, and who lobbied tirelessly for the cancellation of debts owed to Jewish lenders. The result was that, throughout much of the fourteenth century, Castilian Jews found themselves with a heavy tax burden and increasingly dwindling financial resources with which to pay it.40 In the wake of violence or migration, a given Jewish community or collecta of communities could find it difficult to meet even the normal tax demands. The rich often paid for the poor, and regularly complained of shouldering too great a percentage of the communal burden. To make matters worse, the Castilian maravedí was continually debased throughout this period, making it one

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of the weakest currencies in Europe in the later Middle Ages.41 In the Crown of Aragon, too, fiscal problems had been a long time in the making. King Jaume II had been forced to sell off various parts of his royal patrimony to fund his costly war with Sardinia. As a result the crown’s avenues for income narrowed, putting even more pressure on municipalities and Jewish communities.42 The increased financial demands prompted the town councils to turn on the Jews, and the Jews to turn on one another. The ruinous wars of mid-­century intensified the need for greater and more permanent forms of revenue. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, the sting of increased taxation was compounded by the problem of personal and communal debt. The issue of overwhelming debt was one that was raised at nearly every session of the Cortes held throughout this period and was the principal source of tension between Jews and Christians. As noted, tensions and rivalries between various factions had long been part of the internal makeup of Hispano-­Jewish society, and the fourteenth century was no exception. What was different during this period was the difficult economic environment in which these tensions played themselves out. As the larger problems of increased taxes, uncollected debts, and the impoverishment brought on by famine, war, and disease eroded financial security across classes, regions, and religious communities, more people were forced to hide profits, evade taxes, and refuse to repay their debts. The vicious cycle served to intensify hostilities between Christians and Jews. While the structure of medieval Spanish society continued to reinforce the Jews’ position as religiously other and socially marginal, most attacks against the Jews were motivated by financial issues. In almost every outbreak of anti-­ Jewish violence—whatever the context—the destruction of debt records was a common theme.43 Financial troubles also had a direct impact on Jewish communal stability. As we have seen, many Jewish confraternities that had developed at this time did so to more effectively fulfill religious duties such as visiting the sick, burying the dead, or caring for orphans. We should not imagine that members of these mutual aid societies were any different from the rest of Jewish—and non-­Jewish—society. At the best of times, they functioned well, and were able to see to the basic needs of Jewish orphans, the poor, or the sick. However in times of economic scarcity, plague, war, or anti-­Jewish upheaval, these communal institutions were quickly overwhelmed by refugees who might be displaced by war, or who fled their home aljamas’ plague, or who immigrated simply to avoid paying taxes they could not afford. Some sectors of Jewish society remained highly mobile, agile, and adaptable—ever ready to respond to political vicissitudes. For Christians, however,

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such Jews would have reinforced notions of all Jews as outsiders who were unwilling or unable to commit to the long-­term development or defense of their homes. We can imagine a similar response from local Jewish communities, especially among those Jews who were not as mobile and who might wonder if new settlers would contribute to the local tax burden and the upkeep of communal institutions.44 The crown and local Jewish governments did what they could to stop migration, but their powers in this regard were limited. Jewish leaders complained that they could not meet royal demands for taxes, and routinely sought exemptions and delays or to generally renegotiate amounts they owed. “Success” in such negotiations was relative, and even exempted communities remained on the edge of ruin. Fiscally weakened aljamas were even less effective than usual in maintaining order and in forcing their members to contribute their share. As a result they struggled to provide social and religious services to their members, and the rift between the governors and the governed widened. The great wealth amassed by a handful of Jewish courtiers should not overshadow the fact that most Jews lived on the edge of financial ruin for much of the fourteenth century. Unlike the case in the previous two centuries, when the wars of territorial expansion often brought financial windfalls for the king as well as for many nobles, the Aragonese and Castilian civil wars and the subsequent “War of the Two Peters” brought the combatants little more than destruction and a need to rebuild. That these wars came on the heels of several famines and the outbreak of the Black Death meant that the tax burden to replenish the royal coffers fell on ever fewer taxpaying subjects.

* * * The outbreaks of anti-­ Jewish violence that occurred during the central decades of the fourteenth century were worse than anything that had preceded them in Christian Iberia. Yet even at the height of the panic over the Black Death, such incidents were quite rare; the vast majority of towns and villages with Jewish settlements did not witnesses such attacks. Where violence did occur, it seems to have been more closely related to civil unrest caused by the war between the king and the unionists in the Crown of Aragon and the civil war between the forces of Pedro I and Enrique Trastámara in Castile. In the latter, Enrique’s cynical use of anti-­Jewish propaganda appears to have been a factor in popular attacks on various Jewish communities, but foreign mercenaries on both sides also played a decisive role. Both

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during and after the worst years of anti-­Jewish violence, Spanish kings and the papacy showed a willingness to receive representatives from the Jewish communities and made a concerted effort to respond to their requests. The attitude of the Christian masses and local church and civic officials was not as open and accepting of the Jews. Yet even among these groups there is no evidence of uniform anti-­Jewish sentiment. Anti-­Jewish violence was fierce in some areas and milder or nonexistent in others. Likewise, while some officials conspired to ignore royal edicts and attack the Jews, others stood fast in their defense. As for the bands of assailants, they showed a willingness to attack others as well, especially in the case of Tàrrega, where the original assault on the call was soon eclipsed by citywide hostilities. In referring to the riots during the plague years, the Jews did not see any shift in the way they were viewed by Christian society. They understood the causes for the attacks as being a kind of unreasoned hysteria that naturally manifested itself against them. The takkanot of 1354 stated: “The people . . . made the earth tremble with their cries of: ‘all this is happening because of the sins of Jacob. Let us destroy this nation! Let us kill them!’” Similarly, the papal bull that came in response to their petition for protection said of the Christians: “Without any reason they injure, harass, stone, and even kill the Jews.”45 Here, then, may be the key to understanding the cause of the attacks, as well as the relative absence of contemporary narrative accounts of these and similar outbreaks from preceding decades. The answer seems to be that fear and violence were simply integral parts of the social and cultural makeup of fourteenth-­ century Iberian society. Eruptions of violence seemed to be natural responses to cataclysmic events, such as famines and epidemics, and were viewed by their victims as merely one more example of the cruel capriciousness of life.

CHAPTER 6

1391 Riots, Conversion, and the New Status Quo

The religious, political, and economic antagonisms against the Jews that developed over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries formed a combustible compound. In the summer of 1391, these latent hostilities erupted on a scale previously unimaginable. The violence started in Seville, where a local churchman named Ferrante Martínez incited an angry mob to attack the local Jewish quarter. The neighborhood was destroyed and many of its inhabitants killed, while others saved themselves only by accepting baptism. The rioting quickly spread to Córdoba, Toledo, Valencia, and Barcelona—even as far as Mallorca in the Balearic Islands. Friars, merchants, and members of the nobility joined mobs of urban artisans and rural peasants in their attacks on a series of terrified Jewish communities. The kings of Castile and Aragon did their best to protect their Jewish subjects, but with little success. By the time they were able to restore some semblance of order late that autumn, many of the major Jewish centers in Spain had been destroyed. The scope of the damage that had been done was unprecedented, as was the number of conversions that had taken place. In just a few months, an entirely new stratum of Spanish society arose, that of the conversos or “New Christians,” permanently altering Jewish-­ Christian relations in the peninsula. For the next quarter-­century, those Jews who survived would be subjected to an intense program of Christian missionizing aimed at bringing about the end of Jewish life in the Spanish kingdoms. Traumatized and disconsolate, waves of Jews succumbed to these new pressures and abandoned their ancestral tradition. Between 1391 and 1415, Jews continued to convert out of fear, desperation, and in at least some cases, conviction. For many the choice to convert was pragmatic—a desperate attempt to keep their families

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intact. Others were moved by the fearsome spectacle of the Dominican preacher Vicente Ferrer and his band of flagellants, who roamed Castile and the Crown of Aragon in search of converts. In the end, however, the efforts of Ferrer and his accomplices fell short of their ultimate goal: the conversion of all the Jews of Spain. The creation of these converso communities that existed somewhere between the Jewish and Christian society would come to represent a major turning point in the history of Spanish Jewry. The cataclysmic events of 1391 represent the realization of the Jews’ darkest fears. The threat of conversion haunted Jewish life throughout the medieval world. The greatest concern was not that of forced conversion; the basic modus vivendi was that both Muslim and Christians societies allowed Jews to live in their midst as a subjugated but protected minority. Instead, the more prevalent fear was that individual Jews would find life as a Jew too difficult—and life as a Muslim or Christian too attractive—and would then voluntarily convert. To be sure, the fear of forced conversion did exist. Violence was part and parcel of medieval culture, as has been discussed in the previous chapter. Social, political, and economic tensions could engulf any sector of society. Religious antagonism was part of this cultural setting, and Jews were constantly susceptible to violent attacks, even if these were only sporadic. In the history of Spanish Jewry, large-­scale conversions born of violence and coercion took place twice prior to the late fourteenth century. In the early Middle Ages, the Visigothic kings who came to rule Roman Hispania appear to have outlawed Judaism on more than one occasion. Documents that refer to the repeated conversion of all Jews suggest that these decrees did not always have their desired effect, but the impact of these forced conversions on the Jewish populace would have been distressing nonetheless. And, as we have seen, Andalusi Jews were also forced to convert, en masse, by the Almohad rulers of the twelfth century. As had been the case under the Visigoths, Judaism in Spain managed to survive the Almohad persecutions, chiefly among those who escaped their dominions and came to settle in the towns and cities of Christian Iberia. There, as Jewish society flourished within a different matrix of attitudes and policies regarding religious minorities, concerns regarding the temptations of voluntary conversion once again replaced fears of compulsion among Jewish leaders. Nor were these fears wholly unjustified. Some Jews did convert of their own accord over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but their numbers were never large, and most appear to have been motivated by socioeconomic desperation rather than religious conviction. Occasional

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incidents of forced conversions also took place, under varying circumstances: during a forced sermon, the attending Christian crowd might become overzealous, for example. But such events were rare. The most troubling development of this period was not the absolute number of conversions to Christianity but the prominence of a few converts in Christian society, and their decision to act as significant antagonists to their former community.1 Jewish leaders watched with concern as these converts helped to sharpen Christian polemics against Judaism, focusing their attention on potentially problematic sections of the Talmud. In a trend that had begun in the late thirteenth century with works like Ramon Martí’s Pugio Fidei (The Dagger of Faith), the Talmud had become a source of increasing interest for Christian polemicists who sought to prove that the Jews are not blind infidels but knowing heretics. Several prominent conversos with a strong grounding in Talmudic exegesis became preachers, joining the Franciscans and Dominicans who harangued and fulminated against the Jews.2 Thus Jewish scholars who had become used to heated debates among their fellow rabbis now found themselves confronted with attacks from increasingly assertive Christian adversaries. In the 1370s and 1380s, Christian preachers stepped up the frequency of their forced sermons to the Jews, as well as their general level of vitriol. Public religious disputations joined the forced sermons, and both drew large crowds of impassioned onlookers. In Ávila, Rabbi Moses ha-­Kohen of Tordesillas debated the former Jew John of Valladolid. Their encounter took place in 1375, the same year that Rabbi Shem Tov ibn Shaprut engaged Cardinal Pedro de Luna (the future antipope Benedict XIII) in Pamplona. In Huesca in 1377, a converso preacher named Arnau Estadella led forced sermons and debates against Jews in response to accusations of host desecration.3 This new religious antagonism contributed to an increasingly charged atmosphere that, at times, produced outbreaks of anti-­Jewish violence. In Perpignan attacks on the Jewish call took place in 1367 and again in 1370.4 In Castile anti-­Jewish rhetoric, which had for more than a century been part of the parliamentary debates regarding Jewish status, now reached new heights. The meeting of the Castilian Cortes held at Toro in 1371 managed to combine religious demonization of the Jews and their characterization as enemies of the common man with particular boldness. Because of the great liberty and power that was given to the enemies of the Faith, especially the Jews, in all of our kingdoms, in the [royal]

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house, as well as in the houses of the barons, nobles, knights and squires of our kingdoms, and because of the great offices and honors that [the Jews] received there, all the Christians had to obey and fear them and pay them the greatest respects possible, so that the concejos of cities, towns, and villages of our kingdoms, as well as individuals, were slaves and terrified subjects of the Jews due to the great position and honors that they were seen to have had in [the royal] house and in the houses of the great men of our kingdoms . . . and as a result the Jews, being as they are a wicked, insolent people, enemies of God and of all Christendom, with great audacity committed many wicked deeds and briberies, in such a way that all our kingdoms, or the greater part of them, were destroyed and despoiled by the Jews, and this they did while scorning Christians and our Catholic Faith.5 The Jews pushed back against these increased attacks on their rights, making formal complaints to local and royal authorities, and threatened the preachers with retribution from their lord and protector, the king. Yet despite a royal declaration that the Jews’ rights should not be infringed upon, the crown generally allowed the forced sermons to continue, relying on the presence of royal representatives to keep the peace. Such an approach proved far too weak to curb the mounting anti-­Jewish pressure. Popular preachers enflamed the passions of their Christian audiences, in clear defiance of royal policy. Perhaps the most audacious and influential of these was Ferrante Martínez, archdeacon of Écija and canon of the cathedral in Seville. Martínez had preached against the Jews in and around Seville throughout the 1370s and 1380s, routinely inciting mobs to violence. These uprisings were repeatedly, though somewhat ineffectively, censured by the crown. In 1378, after receiving complaints by the Jewish aljama of Seville, King Enrique II issued a decree that Martínez was to cease his provocation against the Jews, and that the latter be protected by those royal officials with jurisdiction over the city.6 Martínez responded to these and other rebukes by announcing that he was not constrained by secular authorities, “for neither the Holy Church of God nor its clerics can be judged by royal jurisdiction.”7 He was further emboldened when two of his most powerful critics, King Juan I and the archbishop of Seville, Pedro Gómez Barroso, both died in the summer and fall of 1390.8 Juan was succeeded by the nine-­year-­old Enrique III. The boy-­king had little help, as his regency council was badly divided and took more than a year to constitute itself. By the early months of 1391, Ferrante Martínez had

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renewed his anti-­Jewish preaching, causing alarm among the Jews of Seville and throughout Castile.

The Rupture of 1391 Anti-­Jewish riots began to break out in the spring of 1391, leading to the destruction of several synagogues in several small communities near Seville. The violence prompted legal action on the part of the Jews, and threats that they would abandon the region if greater protections were not put in place. Royal and ecclesiastical officials ordered that Martínez be stripped of his position as judge and forced to rebuild the destroyed synagogues, and to abandon his program of sermons against the Jews. Martínez balked at these demands, stating that he was not beholden to royal or church orders that were clearly made under Jewish influence. He declared that the synagogues that had been destroyed, like synagogues throughout the kingdom, were illegally built, and little more than “houses of the devil.” The archdeacon’s defiance of royal pressure and continued rhetoric against the Jews found a ready audience among many in Andalusia who saw themselves as victims of corrupt royal policies resulting from undue Jewish influence at court. As popular hostility against the Jews spread from Seville to Córdoba and the surrounding towns, this rebellious posture toward royal authority prompted an angry mob to rise up and imprison Seville’s chief magistrate in response to his punishment of anti-­ Jewish agitators.9 Finally, in early June 1391, anti-­Jewish sentiment in Andalusia erupted into a full-­blown uprising. The city’s judería was sacked and many of its inhabitants murdered. Others agreed to convert in order to save their lives, hoping to pacify the fury of the mob. As had been the norm throughout the turbulent fourteenth century, the crown sent out letters to its officers and to local authorities to contain these popular revolts. The king and his regents started with the city of Burgos, which he recognized as “the principal city of Castile and of my chamber,” hoping that its leadership in this matter would serve as a model, and a warning, to other locales. While these early efforts to protect the Jews of Burgos appear to have been successful, the king failed to stem the tide of anti-­Jewish rioting in other regions. Riots against the Jews broke out in several cities in Castile, including Jerez de la Frontera, Toledo, Cuenca, Madrid, Segovia, Soria, and Logroño. While the precise pathway of the violence remains unclear, its rapid diffusion suggests that years of agitation against the crown

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and its Jewish subjects had produced a combustible situation throughout the kingdom, a situation that was perhaps exacerbated by the relative weakness of the young king. We also know very little about the exact responses of the various Jewish communities that were attacked. Royal chronicles mention death and destruction of property, and Jewish poems composed after the events mourn the dead as martyrs who took their own lives. Writing from Saragossa several months after the initial riots, the great rabbi and communal leader Hasdai Crescas noted that some of the Jews of Toledo chose to sacrifice themselves in the name of God, while others saved themselves through conversion to Christianity.10 While details regarding the course of anti-­Jewish violence in Castile are scarce, we can make at least two key observations. First, news of the riots in Andalusia seems to have struck a chord with Christians of nearly every social class and region in Castile, and they responded in ways that were repeated throughout the Crown of Aragon. Stories of violence being visited on the Jews and of their conversion in larger numbers were seen by many as acts of God, and mobs of Christians quickly formed in town after town to carry out what they saw as God’s will. Second, these riots left a trail of death, destruction, and conversion in their wake as terrified Jews desperately cast about for a way to save themselves. The violence spread with a rapidity and fervor that left royal and municipal authorities reeling as they sought to protect their Jewish subjects and maintain order. Indeed, it is remarkable just how quickly the hastily formed mobs of insurgents came to understand and accept the new rules of engagement. Jews would now be forced to choose between acceptance of Christianity and death. When the violence reached the city of Valencia in early July, Christian youths approached the Jewish quarter “shouting that the Archdeacon of Castile [Ferrante Martínez] is coming and that all Jews should be baptized or die.”11 The Jews closed off the entrances to their quarter, but some of the Christian boys who had already penetrated it were now trapped inside. Cries went up that the Jews were killing the Christian youths. A huge mob soon amassed outside the Jewish quarter. Attackers leapt over the walls of the quarter from nearby rooftops, killing many of its residents, and opened the gates to the rest of the mob. The sack of the Jewish quarter of Valencia lasted for days, with murder and rape among the atrocities that were committed. Duke Martí, the king’s brother, then present in the city, was unable to prevent the riots. He finally decided to send priests into the Jewish quarter to baptize the remaining Jews.

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This tactic produced the desired results: As more and more Jews accepted baptism, the violence against them and their homes subsided. The Jews of Valencia were the first in the Crown of Argon to fall victim to mob violence that summer. They would not be the last. The destruction of the Jewish community of Valencia sent shockwaves through the Crown of Aragon. As had been the case in Castile, news of the riots seemed to inspire outbreaks against the Jews in town after town, as the region rapidly descended into lawlessness. The crown, including King Joan, Queen Iolant, and Duke Martí, all set about writing letters to royal representatives and municipal officials in a number of cities, demanding that they protect the lives and property of the king’s Jews. Jews from the surrounding region poured into the coastal town of Morvedre, just north of Valencia, where local officials moved them to the castle. Morvedre proved to be an effective sanctuary, and most of the Jews there survived unscathed. Unfortunately, similar safeguards in other locales did not yield the same results. In Xàtiva, a leading Jewish center in the southern part of the Kingdom of Valencia, the Jews were forced to relocate to the local fortress for their own protection, but to little avail. News of events in Castile and Valencia had reached the town, and tales of spontaneous Jewish conversions were widely interpreted as miracles and proof of divine decree. Trapped in the castle, the entire Jewish community of Xàtiva converted.12 In Mallorca, where general political unrest had long been brewing, the king wrote to an array of royal and local officials and ordered them to take the appropriate steps to ensure the safety of the Jewish populations of the city and its environs. On August 2, the governor of Mallorca and an armed band of men from the city confronted a large mob of people from the countryside who were on their way to attack the Jewish quarter. But a second wave of rioters composed of people from the city soon joined the group from the countryside, overwhelming the governor and his men and bursting forth upon the call. The call was sacked by the mob, and more than three hundred Jews were massacred while others fled to the castle. The insurgents remained in control of much of the island for nearly two months, and eventually forced the city councilors of Mallorca to accept a number of new conditions, including that the remainder of Mallorcan Jewry would convert.13 Just days after the first attacks on the Jews of Mallorca, a new wave of riots broke out in Barcelona. The Jewish community of Barcelona remained among the largest and most important in Spain, despite having suffered greatly during the riots that accompanied the Black Death at mid-­century.

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Active measures for protection of the city’s Jews had been in place throughout much of July, and the municipal government had succeeded in maintaining order. But government attention soon drifted to other matters, including the preparation of a military expedition that Duke Martí was organizing to sail for Sicily. On August 5, many of the soldiers and sailors who had gathered at the port joined locals in their attack on the Jewish quarter. A now-­familiar cycle of killing, looting, and forced conversions ensued. The course of the riots in Barcelona suggests that, while religious fervor and political tensions fueled the riots, many also took advantage of the general state of chaos to settle old scores, loot, and free themselves from debts owed to Jewish creditors. Throughout the Crown of Aragon, theft, rape, and the destruction of loan documents accompanied forced conversions and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues. The perpetrators of these crimes came from all sectors of Christian society: peasants from the countryside, urban craftsmen, young boys and students at local ecclesiastical schools, but also older urban citizens and members of the nobility. The popular association of Jews with money had long made them tempting targets during moments of public disorder. This was true not only for the local Christian population but also for foreigners, particularly foreign soldiers and sailors who readily exploited such moments of chaos for their own economic benefit. As noted in the previous chapter, English and French soldiers sacked the Castilian Jewish quarters during the civil war there in the 1360s. A similar scene took place in 1386, when the Duke of Lancaster arrived in Galicia to press his claim to the Castilian throne. His troops plundered the town of Ribadavia, and rumors spread that they found more gold and silver in the Jews’ homes than in any other place. In 1398 the small Jewish community in the Aragonese town of Montalbán were still recovering from the violence of 1391, when they were once again attacked by foreign crusaders on their way to Muslim lands.14 The participation of soldiers gathered in the harbor at Barcelona in the summer of 1391 thus represents an expansion of the violence against the Jews there, but not a cause. In every region where rioting against the Jews took place, it followed a similar, terrifying pattern. Violence quickly gained momentum as members of every corner of Christian society joined in the murder, looting, and coerced conversion of the Jews. We know little of the rumors that circulated among the Jews about what was happening in other communities, near and far, but we can imagine the level of terror and despair that must have swept over them as news from other regions began to reach them. At the very least

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many were able to witness for themselves the complete breakdown of the social order as local and royal officials proved unwilling or unable to restrain the mobs. In many towns and villages, rumors that the Jews now wanted to convert fired the popular imagination, and whole communities converted en masse as zealous mobs closed in around them. As news of the attacks in Valencia and Barcelona reached the countryside, panicked Jews looked for a way to save themselves. Those from small towns or villages who sought safety in larger towns or fortified strongholds often met with the same violence, death, or conversion from which they fled. Indeed, the crown’s own efforts to protect the Jews often fell short. In Lleida, the local castle in which the Jews had been granted safe haven fell to an armed mob, and many of its Jews were murdered together with their Christian defenders. The castles of Tarragona and Cervera were likewise overwhelmed by the insurgents after Jews had fled their quarters to take refuge there. Elsewhere, Jews of Montblanc were granted safe passage to the nearby town of Vallespinosa, but their writ of safe-­conduct had little effect, and the refugees took canon fire as they attempted to flee. At Tortosa and Puigcerdà, Jews received protection, food, and drink at the castle, and King Joan sent a special royal official, Micer Domingo Mascho, to oversee their protection. The cost of both the provisions and the services of Micer Domingo were, of course, to be taken from funds provided by the Jews themselves.15 As physical protection and threats of royal reprisals proved insufficient to quell the fury of the rioters, the Jews’ lords turned to conversion as a way to bring the situation under control. In Mallorca conversion of all Jews was a rebel demand to which the crown ultimately was forced to acquiesce. Elsewhere royal authorities used conversion as a method of hastening a return to business as usual. In September 1391, as the principal waves of unrest had begun to subside, Duke Martí sought to pressure the Jews in his jurisdiction to accept baptism. Only then, he informed them, would they be helped to collect the debts owed to them. Jews and Christian authorities alike hoped that conversion would mollify the mob and put an end to the destruction that threatened to engulf urban society. In many places, it did. By October the killing and looting abated as royal authorities, initially overwhelmed by the power and rapid diffusion of the violence, finally succeeded in restoring order. But as an uneasy calm settled over the peninsula that autumn, the surviving Jews were left to survey the extant of the devastation. What they saw was no doubt difficult for them to absorb. Modern scholars have often seen the cataclysmic events of 1391 as a culmination of

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mounting hostilities over the course of the fourteenth century, and as part of a larger legacy of medieval violence against the Jews. For their part medieval Jewish chroniclers placed the riots into a traditional framework of divine retribution for their collective sins. But to those Jews who lived through the harrowing summer of 1391, the wholesale destruction of so many of their communities was without precedent or easy justification. Many who had survived the surge of violence by taking shelter in royal castles were soon kicked out, forced to return to what was left of their “homes.” The term was now little more than a euphemism. The plunder of their houses, businesses, and personal possessions had been thorough. Speaking on behalf of many communities, Hasdai Crescas noted, “Nothing remains to us but our bodies.” Nor had the attacks truly come to an end. Sporadic outbursts of violence continued throughout the following months, as did renewed efforts to convert those Jews who remained. The king and queen individually called for the Jews to be protected and justice to be served, but municipal and rural officials showed little enthusiasm in this regard. Those Jews whose jobs as peddlers and moneylenders bought them out into the countryside did so at great risk. It wasn’t until well into 1392 that the murders of Jews began to slow. The push for their conversion, however, was just beginning.16 At the close of his letter in which he recounted the horrors of the riots, Hasdai Crescas beseeched God to help heal the surviving Jews and “keep their feet from wavering.” The fear of further conversions was real. Many Jewish communities were so devasted that there was little that they could provide in the way of religious services or communal infrastructure for the small number of surviving Jews. As a result, survivors fled their hometowns, seeking to regroup in other, often smaller, locales. But such attempts at resettlement were not always economically viable, and those who could not find sufficient work were quickly faced with a dwindling set of options. The destitute could not wait indefinitely for work, and standard forms of charity or care for the poor were quickly exhausted. In addition to social dislocation and economic collapse, many also faced the emotional strains of families that were now divided by faith. Throughout Spain, Jewish families confronted an odd and distressing reality: Some of their members were now Christian, while others still remained Jewish. Others were left widowed, orphaned, or otherwise alone. In many ways the loss of family support was more devasting than the loss of a local community. Nuclear and extended families were always the bedrock of medieval society, providing essential social, financial and emotional support

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when other communal structures failed. For individual Jews whose family members had been killed or converted, conversion to Christianity was often the best option in terms of survival. In many instances spouses converted to preserve their marriage, and parents converted to retain custody of their children. Others accepted a prolonged state of limbo, existing as religiously divided families and navigating the turbulent waters of their new lives with uncertain futures. Would the authorities come to separate them? Could spouses, now divided by religion, still share a marital bed? Could children inherit from parents who had changed their faith? Indeed, the question of which law would now govern their lives added to the general state of confusion and anxiety. In some cases families who found themselves divided by religion nonetheless chose to remain under the same roof, accepting a new and seemingly untenable reality that endured for years. In Girona, for example, there were still mixed families of Jews and Christians living in the Jewish quarter more than twenty-­five years after the riots of 1391. In many cases, it would seem, family and friends played a greater role than personal faith and religious community in determining how recent converts responded to their predicament. Shortly after the riots of 1391, two conversos were married in Mallorca. When the husband later abandoned his wife and young child, his wife left Mallorca for Bugie, in North Africa, where many conversos had fled, and returned to Judaism. The woman’s decision to leave Mallorca and Christianity for North Africa and Judaism appears to have been less a matter of religious identity than a more practical question of which personal relations she could count on for support in her daily life.17

Jewish Life in the Wake of the Riots: 1391–1415 As the violence and mass conversions subsided, Spanish society was left to deal with a new social reality for which it was ill prepared. One of the immediate and most challenging consequences of the riots was the breakdown of the political leadership of Jewish society. Even as the survivors of the violence came together in an effort to form new communities out of the torn fabric of the old, they often found themselves without the sort of spiritual guidance or connections to the seats of power in Christian society that had always been vital to their organization and defense. Those leaders who had been lost to conversion served as poignant and demoralizing reminders of the new status quo.

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One such convert was Rabbi Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet, known in rabbinic circles by his acronym Ribash. At the time of the riots, Perfet was in his sixties and widely regarded as one of the foremost rabbinic authorities of his generation. Perfet was originally from Barcelona, and his fame as a Talmudist and legal expert brought him first to Saragossa and then to the city of Valencia, where he was the leading rabbi when the first wave of violence erupted there in July 1391. Although he survived this initial onslaught, he soon become the object of unwanted attention from the city council, which pressured him to convert in the days immediately following the riots. Charged with crimes that he did not commit, Perfet accepted baptism, changing his name to Master Jaume and donning the robes of a Dominican friar.18 And thus he lived in Valencia for more than a year before making his escape to Algiers, where he once again assumed the position of rabbi and leader of a Jewish community. Another rabbinic luminary, Simon ben Semah Duran of Mallorca, soon joined Perfet in Algiers. Hasdai Crescas, perhaps the most imposing rabbinic figure of the time, lost a son in the 1391 riots. In the chaos that followed, Crescas attempted to reestablish a semblance of order in his adopted home of Saragossa by issuing an ordinance (takkanah) that greatly empowered the ruling elite. Crescas’s efforts to bring about order through greater authoritarian rule echoed that of the Jewish leaders who issued the takkanah of Barcelona in the years following the Black Death. And, as had been the case with this earlier attempt at reform, other Jewish factions sought to modify the ordinance. Queen Iolant did intercede, leading to the promulgation of a somewhat more balanced takkanah. Nonetheless, the queen granted Crescas the unprecedented position of head judge over all matters regarding Jewish malsinim (informers) for the realm, an office that invested him with the ability to impose capital punishments on any offenders.19 Yet if Crescas’s methods were those of a Jewish grandee of the period, his motives were anything but selfish. Until his death in 1410, he continued to work indefatigably to salvage and restore Jewish social, economic, and intellectual life throughout Iberia and southern France. From Saragossa he corresponded with the pope, the kings of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre, and Jewish leaders as far away as Avignon.20 And while the large numbers of deaths and wholesale destruction of communities were perhaps the most tragic legacy of the summer of 1391, the mass conversions that had taken place presented Jewish society with a more enduring and intractable set of problems. Foremost among them was the sheer magnitude of the conversions, which turned out to be a major obstacle

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to assimilating the converts into Christian society. In the past the task of providing new housing, new professions, and religious instruction for those few individuals who accepted baptism had been relatively easy. But during the period between the first mass conversions in 1391 and the fallout from the Disputation of Tortosa (ca. 1415), the logistical problems associated with such widespread conversions proved insurmountable. There was simply no quick or efficient way to disentangle the so-­called “New” Christians (cristianos nuevos) from their Jewish neighbors and family members. A new social reality had begun to set in. The size and scope of the conversions of 1391 were so extensive that the standard laws governing religious communities and religious identities could not be applied in any organized or systematic way. Secular and religious authorities lacked the manpower, and often the inclination, to administer the new situation in any cohesive and coherent way. For months and years after the summer of 1391, Spanish society remained theologically, politically, and socially ill-­equipped to integrate the New Christians into Old Christian society. Church and crown employed varying methods, none of which were particularly constructive. In those communities where the majority of Jews had converted, died, or moved away, there was often a strong impetus on the part of local Christian authorities to convert the remaining Jews, one way or another. Municipalities attempted to seize personal and communal property belonging to Jews, prompting the king to remind them that such measures were in violation of the Jews’ rights. Christian preachers and other religious figures also pushed for the conversion—or elimination—of the remainder of the Jews. For many in Christian society, the wave of conversions was proof that the long-­awaited apocalypse was now approaching. The dominant figure during this period was Vincent Ferrer. A Dominican friar and native of Valencia, Ferrer rose to become one of the most famous and powerful itinerant preachers in all of Europe and the personal confessor to the antipope, Benedict XIII. Ferrer stood at the forefront of a movement of charismatic preachers who drew on the energy of 1391 to encourage the millenarian fantasies of Spanish Christians. If only they could convert the remainder of the Jews, it was thought, hope for universal redemption might be fully realized. And so it was that, for nearly twenty years following the mass conversions, the bedraggled Jewish survivors were subject to intensified missionary pressure. At the height of his career as a preacher, Ferrer had a regular following of some three hundred flagellants and often led thousands as he traveled. Yet as effective as he was in igniting the passions of his

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Christian audiences, he also took seriously his role as converter of the Jews. If his Castilian counterpart, Martínez, was a local politico with a strong socioeconomic animus against the Jews, Ferrer was instead interested in theological issues, particularly in reforming Christian morals and the role that conversion would play in the advent of the Second Coming. He was active throughout Castile, the Crown of Aragon, and beyond, and was more successful than Martínez in bending royal opinion to his will. In both Castile and Aragon, authorities forced Jews to attend Ferrer’s sermons, threatening them with large fines or imprisonment should they refuse. These sermons could last for hours. At several points Ferrer would speak directly and indignantly to the Jews in attendance. Invoking a combination of old and new positions regarding the Jews, Ferrer alternately appealed to those who had yet to comprehend the truth of Christianity and forcefully condemned those who had already apprehended this truth yet rejected it nonetheless. These two themes—the Jew as blind infidel and as evil heretic—would typify the two primary modes of Hispano-­Christian thinking with regard to the Jews during the period between the late fourteenth and mid-­fifteenth centuries. During the second half of the fifteenth century, they would give way to another, much darker position: that Jews were not only unwilling but actually unable to become full Christians. But during the first generation after 1391, Christian thinking about both Jews and conversos was still relatively ill-­defined. In the kingdom of Valencia, for instance, legislation meant to limit contact between Jews and conversos refers to Jews in both universal religious terms and local sociopolitical terms. In the wake of the mass conversions of 1391, the parliamentary Corts of Valencia appears to have been primarily concerned with the potential influence of local Jews on recent converts, since they were more likely to be relatives of local conversos, and therefore able to hold sway over them in matters of religious practice. Jews who were not native to the region, it was thought, would have far less influence in this regard. Moreover, the Corts was equally concerned with stabilizing the region’s economy and fully aware that restrictions on foreign Jewish merchants might lead to stagnation in trade. As a result, some anti-­Jewish discriminatory laws, such as the requirement for Jews to wear a distinguishing badge, were not enforced against Jewish merchants from outside Valencia. Indeed, these foreign Jews were even granted permission to lodge with local converso families.21 Many Jews continued to view the conversos as part of the Jewish community, despite their new religious affiliation, and would often prefer to lodge

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with them than with “Old” Christians. While the Christian authorities sought to enforce boundaries between Jews and conversos, their pragmatic approach to this problem acknowledged the relative importance of family ties and made allowances for pressing economic needs. Despite the protests from various corners of the Christian community, the Corts were willing to allow relations between local conversos and visiting Jews to continue in order to prevent the development of similar bonds between local members of these communities, which they saw to be more problematic. In some cities, authorities devised their own solutions to the problem of converso religiosity. In Valencia, now home to one of the largest converso population in the peninsula, the city councilors decreed that many should be forcibly moved out of their quarter so that they might live among “natural” Christians of ancient lineage (cristianos naturales or cristianos viejos). Their decision came at the urging of Vincent Ferrer, who reasoned that it was only through exposure to proper Christian beliefs and customs that these neophytes would be able to evolve into true Christians. Ferrer seemed to be everywhere during this era, traveling, preaching, and advising royal and local authorities throughout Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Those Jews who responded to his verbal assaults risked physical abuse at the hands of his zealous supporters. In Perpignan, when a group of Jews dared to speak out against a sermon given by Ferrer, they found themselves under attack by his Christian audience.22 In his push to convert the remainder of Spanish Jewry, Ferrer had the backing of the Avignon papacy and the crowns of both Castile and Aragon. While the preacher denounced the practice of forced conversion, he nonetheless did everything short of physical violence to make Jewish life untenable. Ferrer helped spearhead the movement to segregate the Jews from the rest of Christian society, principally to lessen their potential influence on the conversos. He was the inspiration behind the Laws of Ayllón, drawn up in Castile in 1412, which aimed to so thoroughly embitter the lives of the kingdom’s remaining Jews that they would be induced to convert. They did succeed in evicting Jews from their homes and their jobs; many found it difficult to locate new housing and instead sought shelter in caves and rural huts. These new privations proved too much for some, giving rise to still more conversions. Yet while such efforts received initial royal support, there was no systematic implementation. The response of the Christian populace to the place of the conversos in the larger scheme of Christian-­Jewish relations was marked by a certain level

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of ambivalence. In the period between 1391 and the Disputation of Tortosa (1413–14), when Christian missionary zeal was at its peak, the conversion of the Jews seemed to prove the truth of Christianity and held out the promise of a new messianic age. But such expectations were far from universal and, even among its supporters, hard to sustain. Moreover, longstanding negative characterizations of the Jews as deceitful enemies of Christianity challenged the underlying theological message behind the missionary movement. Many saw the conversion of the Jews as a punishment they had to suffer more than as a fulfillment of Christian doctrine. Even those who once cheered their Jewish neighbors’ decisions to accept baptism soon began to question the sincerity of those conversions. And as Christian hopes for an apocalyptic moment started to fade, they were replaced by the bitter realities of what seemed a thoroughly corrupt and unjust society. The conversos, once a tangible sign of Christian triumph, quickly became merely the latest symbol of general impiety and disorder. And so, even as Vincent Ferrer worked tirelessly to bring about the conversion of the remaining Jews, Christian doubts regarding converso devotion began to spread. Many now wondered aloud whether these “New” Christians were still, in essence, Jews. Others accepted them nominally as Christians but balked at the notion that their neighbors, whom they had known as rabbis, tanners, and moneylenders, were now just as Christian as they were. Christian enough to marry into their family. Christian enough to marry into the nobility and become their lord. Christian enough to become their priest, or even their bishop, to handle the Host, and to forgive their sins. For church doctrine, and for the official position of the crowned heads of Castile and Aragon, there was no doubt that these conversos were now Christians—even if they were considered neophytes in need of guidance and education. Many others, however, were far more suspicious of the conversos’ Christian identity, choosing instead to believe that even voluntary baptism could not counteract the Jews’ inherent difference. Many indeed began to hold the opinion that the “New” Christians, no matter what they did, would always be Jews. The royal authorities in both Castile and Aragon made efforts to combat this thinking, attempting to enforce separate residential neighborhoods for Jews and conversos and decreeing that conversos were not to use or be called by any Jewish name.23 In the Crown of Aragon, Martí, the former duke and now king, issued a law forbidding conversos from practicing Jewish rites and customs, including the observance of the Jewish Sabbath and the celebration of Jewish holidays. But there was as of yet no reliable mechanism to enforce such

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decrees, and little that the crown did managed to sway popular opinion on such matters. An even greater concern for the court was the problem of conversos leaving the realm to revert to Judaism in Muslim lands. The loss of revenue and talent combined with the intolerable notion of losing baptized souls to apostasy spurred the king’s efforts to block all conversos s from overseas travel. As early as 1394, in response to the flight of conversos to North Africa from Mallorca and Valencia, King Joan I of Aragon forbade all conversos from leaving his domain. The king had condemned the riots and sought to return the Jews to their traditional status as protected, and profitable, subjects of the crown. This included a program of attracting new Jewish settlers to his domain. In 1393 Joan had issued a general safe-­conduct to any Castilian Jews who wished to come and settle in Valencia in an effort to rebuild the Jewish communities there. Groups of conversos also came, but with different motives. Despite royal efforts, Valencia continued to be an important gateway for escaping conversos seeking to revert to Judaism in North Africa.24 There was relatively little concern on the part of Christian authorities with regard to “judaizing,” the Christian term used to describe the continued observance of Jewish customs and practices. The crown seemed to be more concerned with keeping conversos from fleeing the realm than in monitoring their true religious beliefs, and even less interested in their full integration into Christian society. Popular distrust of this first generation of conversos was exacerbated by the relative ease with which several prominent converts were able to assume positions of power and honor, both at the royal court and within the church. What some saw as the logical consequence of removing the religious obstacle from otherwise competent and learned men, others took to be evidence of the power-­hungry cupidity of the Jews who now masqueraded as Christians to better access wealth and power. Converso churchmen Pablo de Santa María and Jerónimo de Santa Fé were two of the most prominent such figures. Pablo de Santa María, who began his scholarly career as Rabbi Solomon Halevi in Burgos, appears to have converted voluntarily sometime around 1391, possibly prior to the riots. The former Halevi had come from a prominent Jewish family in Burgos and was a leading rabbinic authority and courtier in his late thirties at the time of his conversion. While it is unclear what, exactly, moved him to embrace Christianity, we know that his decision prompted his children and siblings to follow his example. Their transition from an old and important Jewish family into an even more powerful and influential clan of New Christians was swift and almost seamless; only

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Halevi’s wife decided to remain Jewish. As a Catholic priest, the now Pablo de Santa María retained the favor of the royal court, to which he added the patronage of the Avignon papacy. He rose quickly within the hierarchy of the church, and was granted the episcopal see of Cartagena and then that of Burgos. An intimate of Enrique III of Castile, he was later appointed court chaplain and tutor of the king’s son, the future Juan II. Pablo also extended the power of the Santa María family, which soon counted several bishops and other important statesmen among their number. Pablo’s son, Alonso Santa María de Cartagena, had a distinguished career as a scholar and diplomat and on his father’s death succeeded him as bishop of Burgos. The anomaly of a major episcopal seat passing from father to son was striking even in those days of rapid change and upheaval. That both bishops were former Jews was all the more disorienting for many Christians. Many Jews also found the transformations of leading Jewish families into leading Christian families to be disturbing. They too had a longstanding tradition of criticism and distrust regarding Jewish courtiers who seemed more interested in their own personal advancement than in the welfare of their fellow Jews. For many the waves of conversion that took place during and after the summer of 1391, and the apparent prosperity and freedom enjoyed by prominent conversos such as the Santa María family, only served to amplify these feelings of abandonment. When news of Solomon Halevi’s conversion reached one of his Jewish students, Joshua Halorki, the latter penned an open letter to the former rabbi in which he surveyed the various possibilities for what might have led Halevi to accept baptism. In listing these potential reasons for voluntary conversion, Halorki offers a summary of popular Jewish criticism of the conversos, giving voice to the bitterness, resentment, and rumors that circulated among the Jews of the period. Perhaps your appetitive soul longed to climb the rungs of wealth and honor which everyone desires and to satisfy the craving soul with all manner of food and to gaze upon the resplendent beauty of the countenance of Gentile women. Or perhaps you were seduced by philosophical inquiry to overturn the bowl and to consider the underpinnings of all faiths to be vanity and works of delusion and so you turned to a religion more conducive to bodily calm and to peace of mind and not accompanied by terrors and fear and dread. Or when you observed the destruction of our homeland and the many troubles

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that have recently befallen us, consuming and scattering us—and that God has almost hidden his countenance from us and made us as food to the birds of the heaven and wild beasts of the earth, it occurred to you that the name of Israel will be remembered no more.25 Here we are presented with a catalog of Jewish responses to the phenomenon of conversion, ranging from petty jealousies over the opportunities now afforded to the conversos to longstanding fears over the potentially corrosive nature of philosophical studies to the eternal concern that the divine covenant might be broken. The final possible motive suggested by Halorki was one that perhaps cut deepest among the intellectuals of his class: “Or perhaps there were revealed to you in the secrets of prophecy and the basic principles of faith and their proofs, such as were not revealed to the pillars of the world amongst our people during all the days of our long Exile, and you concluded that our forefathers had inherited falsehood because of their limited understanding of the Torah and of prophecy and therefore you chose what you chose because it is true and certain.”26 Whether Halorki’s addressee, Solomon Halevi, converted to Christianity just prior to 1391 or during the tumultuous period that followed, the questions raised in this open letter resonated for years to come among both Jews and conversos. Spain’s surviving Jewish communities suffered new spasms of conversion for nearly a quarter-­century after the riots. While the atmosphere in which these successive conversions took place was undoubtably coercive, they seemed far more voluntary to many Jewish observers than those of the summer of 1391. As more and more of their friends and relatives accepted baptism, resentment began to replace sympathy. Halorki’s letter touches on the sorts of accusations of opportunism and greed that many Jews saw as the true motivation for these voluntary conversions, as well as on the spiritual concerns for the collective fate of the Jewish people and for their ancestral faith. All of these anxieties, both petty and grave, contributed to an existential crisis in Jewish life for the generation of 1391. Not long after composing his searching reflection on the possible reasons for conversion, Halorki followed Halevi’s example, accepting baptism under the name Jerónimo de Santa Fé. The Jews of Aragon watched in distress as Jerónimo became a manifestation of many of their darkest fears. He moved quickly from being a leading Talmudist to being an equally prominent champion of the church, writing polemics against Judaism and the Talmud in particular. A physician and intimate of the antipope, Benedict XIII,

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Jerónimo soon became a key organizer of a public debate that was meant to demonstrate the truth of Christianity once and for all to a captive audience composed of the leaders of Aragon’s remaining, and seemingly recalcitrant, Jews. This debate, known as the Disputation of Tortosa, represents the acme of Christian missionary efforts in the period directly following the conversions of 1391. More than just a public spectacle aimed at a mostly Christian audience, this great disputation was directed toward the region’s beleaguered Jews in a focused attempt to bring about their collective conversion. To this end, it brought together many of the features of the new missionizing efforts of the church, including the forced participation of Jewish leaders and the use of converts who would draw on their rabbinic training to demonstrate that the Talmud itself proved the truth of Christian doctrine. Beginning in January 1413, the disputation played out over some sixty-­ nine sessions, ending nearly two years later in December 1414. In the final sessions of the debate, held south of Tortosa at the town of Sant Mateu, Jerónimo de Santa Fé argued that the Talmud also contained teachings that contradicted the Hebrew Bible and were hostile to Christianity. The focus on the Talmud as both Christian prooftext and source of anti-­Christian antagonism painted the Jews who still refused to convert as knowingly rejecting truth and light for heretical darkness.27 The Jewish disputants tried to avoid being involved, but this was a command performance. The intent was to thoroughly discredit Judaism until the remaining Jews in Aragon and Castile gave up and accepted Christianity. Letters had gone out to all the remaining Jewish communities in Catalonia and Aragon demanding that each send representatives to Tortosa so that they might receive instruction in Christianity.28 Among the dozens of Jews who were forced to be present at Tortosa, none possessed the stature of Nahmanides, the Jewish champion in the disputation of 1263. Indeed, several of the greatest authorities of the generation—Hasdai Crescas and Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet, and the influential courtier Benvenist de la Cavalleria—had all died a few years earlier. To be sure, there were fine Jewish scholars present, such as Joseph Albo, Solomon Bonafed, Mattathias Yizhari, Solomon da Piera, Astruc Halevi from Alcañiz, and Zerahia Halevi of Saragossa. But none of these possessed the charismatic authority of Nahmanides or, more recently, Crescas. Perhaps more to the point, the atmosphere at Tortosa was strikingly different from that which had existed at Barcelona 150 years earlier. Now the Jewish representatives who were forced to attend left behind communities that were still reeling from the effects of the riots and from Ferrer’s renewed

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missionary campaign. They were well aware that their adversaries intended to wear them down until, exhausted and demoralized, they consented to receiving baptism. As Astruc Halevi complained: “We are away from our homes; our resources have diminished and are almost entirely destroyed; huge damage is resulting in our communities from our absence; we do not know the fate of our wives and children; we have inadequate maintenance here and even lack food, and are put to extraordinary expenses.”29 Halevi and his fellow disputants did what they could to counter the arguments put forth by Jerónimo de Santa Fé, but they had little defense against the psychological pressures to which they were being subjugated as the sessions wore on for weeks and months. Some of the Jewish representatives embraced conversion, including the aged poet Solomon de Piera and the communal leader and spokesman Vidal de la Cavalleria (Vidal ben Lavi). News of these high-­profile conversions spread throughout the Crown of Aragon, demoralizing many and prompting still more conversions. Back at Tortosa, Jerónimo de Santa Fé announced these events as further proof of Christian truth. Some Jewish intellectuals of the period lashed out at these converts, condemning them as little more than base opportunists. Modern scholars, too, have theorized that the ease with which Spanish Jews converted during this period suggests that a certain spiritual and moral weakness had overtaken Jewish society. Such bitterness is, perhaps, understanding, even if the characterization of the converts is not particularly justified. The upheavals of 1391 had destroyed many of the Jewish communities in the crowns of Aragon and Castile, removing their leaders through murder or conversion and gutting their communal institutions. Stunned, the survivors were tasked with regrouping and moving forward amid continuing hostility and with little in the way of resources or experience. Even before the disputation created a charged atmosphere that bordered on the apocalyptic, many had seen conversion as their only legitimate chance at survival. Benedict and Jerónimo were well aware of the precariousness of the Jews’ situation and planned the disputation to be the coup de grâce for Jewish society. From 1413 to 1415, it seemed that they would achieve their goal. To many Jews, the continuous missionary pressure was simply too much to bear. In the summer of 1413, during the very height of the disputation, some two hundred conversions took place among the Jews of Saragossa, Calatayud, and Jerónimo’s hometown of Alcañiz. During the following two years, hundreds more followed in these and other towns, including Daroca, Fraga, Barbastro, Caspe, Maella, Tamarite de Litera, and Alcolea. Dozens of families converted together, and in some towns Jewish life simply

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ceased to exist. This was true even in some larger Jewish centers. The Jewish community of Perpignan, which had generally survived the attacks of 1391, finally collapsed under the conversionary pressures of the early fifteenth century. By 1415, in the immediate aftermath of the Disputation of Tortosa, the community had almost disappeared entirely.30 At the time it must have seemed to many that the Jews’ long history in Christian Spain was coming to an end. Yet despite the truly disastrous effects of these years on Jewish society, the considerable efforts of Vincent Ferrer, Benedict XIII, and Jerónimo de Santa Fé ultimately failed to bring about the full conversion of the remainder of Iberian Jewry. And with that failure, the momentum of the conversion movement seemed to ebb. Both crown and church sought to keep the pressure on the Jews. In 1415 both Fernando I of Aragon and Antipope Benedict instituted anti-­Jewish legislation based on the Castilian Laws of Ayllón. Still none of these measures yielded the desired conversion of the remaining Jews. Ferrer died in the spring of 1419 and took with him much of the missionary spirit of the age. In Castile influence over the young Juan II passed from Queen Catalina to Don Álvaro de Luna, who guided the boy-­king along a more tolerant path regarding the Jews. Many of the most restrictive laws that were established in 1412 were ignored, and in the Crown of Aragon, too, the early part of Alfonso V’s reign, which began in 1416, saw a relaxation of the mounting pressures on the Jews.

Jewish Responses to the New Status Quo While many Jews withstood the missionary pressure of those first turbulent decades following the riots, they nonetheless found themselves living in a fundamentally altered communal landscape. In some regions Jews fled the larger towns and cities for smaller settlements. In most cities where a Jewish community still existed, it did so alongside a group of conversos or New Christians, as they were often called, who were no longer Jews, but who clearly were not quite as Christian—at least in practice—as the “Old” Christians. The Jewish reaction to the rise of the converso community throughout Spain was as varied and complex as that of Hispano-­Christian society. The rabbinic authorities of the period had little choice but to consider the recent converts to be anusim: Jews who had converted under duress and thus were still to be considered Jewish. To recognize otherwise was simply unthinkable. That is, to admit that many had converted voluntarily, and that even many

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of those who had been forced into conversion eventually did their best to accommodate to their new religion, was to acknowledge a widespread lack of faith and to abandon hope of their return. Such a stance would have had serious emotional repercussions for those still clinging to Judaism. Theoretically, both Christian and Jewish law provided clear answers to questions of religious identity and jurisdiction. Unfortunately, the answers of each tradition were often at odds. Even if Christian authorities now compelled the conversos to abandon aspects of Jewish law, leading Spanish rabbis generally declared them to be anusim and thus still Jewish. Christian churchmen countered that converts who received baptism were to be considered Christians, regardless of whether such conversions were coerced. In the eyes of the church, any continued practice of Judaism was thus tantamount to heresy. For the conversos themselves the question of which law to follow—that of the rabbis, which deemed the conversos to be Jewish or that of the governing Christian society that declared them to be Christian—was raised in a number of areas of daily life. Christian lords and municipalities were quick to count the conversos as new members of their tax rolls, and the church too noted that they would need to pay the requisite tithe. These same conversos were not willing to pay twice, both as Christians and still as Jews, removing them in a very concrete way from their former Jewish aljamas. Rabbinic authorities had to answer the many queries that poured in. Could Jews seek inheritance from converso parents? Must Jewish men observe the rite of levirate marriage for the wives of their newly Christian brothers? Is wine produced, or even touched, by conversos still kosher? For their part, Jewish religious authorities who wrote on the question of converso religious status often approached the issue with the sort of careful attention to categories and contexts one would expect of legal authorities. Rather than consider converso religiosity holistically, most rabbis addressed the question of their status vis-­à-­vis a particular legal question. Rabbi Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet, a former converso himself and one of the early rabbinic authorities to establish a framework for succeeding generations of scholars, tended to avoid discussing their essential religious character head on. Instead Perfet evaluated converso identity according to the fulfillment of particular religious duties incumbent upon a Jew (testifying before a Jewish court, handling kosher wine, etc.), and what could be reasonably expected of them at a time when observance of Jewish laws might well endanger their lives. Yet in many of these cases, popular opinion was at odds with rabbinic pronouncements. Whatever their religious leaders might argue, the inability of the conversos to fulfill their obligations

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as Jews convinced many within Jewish society that they were no longer Jewish. Elsewhere the same popular pragmatism led Jews to continue to see these converts as fulfilling an important role in Jewish communal life. In Mallorca, for instance, Jews continued to turn to prominent conversos for help in managing communal affairs well into the fifteenth century.31 Modern studies on the Spanish conversos have traditionally focused on the question of their “true” religious identity. Were they good Catholics unfairly rejected and maligned by the cristianos viejos, or were they crypto-­ Jews holding fast to their ancestral faith? For the first generation of converts, their Jewishness appears to have fallen along a spectrum. Converso intellectuals wrote polemical works to show that their conversion was, alternately, in earnest or false. Rabbis-­turned-­churchmen, such as Pablo de Santa María and Jerónimo de Santa Fé, became leaders of the missionary push to discredit Judaism and effect the conversion of the rest of Spanish Jewry. At the same time Honoratus de Bonafide (the former Profayt Duran) wrote two Hebrew polemical treatises against Christianity, Be Not Like unto Thy Fathers and Shame of the Gentiles, while living openly as a Christian.32 The variety of ways in which contemporaries understood the religious impact of conversion at this time suggests that it might be more helpful to reframe the question altogether. Rather than attempt to categorize the faith of the conversos as a collective, an approach that disregards the complexities of the historical circumstances and human psychology, we might focus on the responses of contemporary Jews to the converso phenomenon. While many Jews showed deep sympathy for the plight of the conversos, others questioned their allegiance to Judaism, even accusing the converts and their offspring of being opportunists who readily embraced the social and economic benefits of Christian identity. The disparity in attitudes regarding converso society was often bound up with the particulars of each situation. Family ties, personal misfortunes, and petty jealousies determined how Jews thought about their former coreligionists more than the pronouncements of their rabbinic leaders. Some Jews were much more solicitous of the conversos—especially of those who were former family members. They continued to socialize with their relatives, regardless of their religious affiliation. Furthermore, it had always been important for Jews to maintain close relationships with Christians neighbors, whom they could count on for their business and the political connections they could provide, as well as for friendship. Determining who was considered to be a Jew and who was not involved factors that had little to do with rabbinic or ecclesiastical categories. Other Jews agreed with many

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of their Christian neighbors that Jews converted for opportunistic reasons. They considered them faithless and wanted nothing to do with them. The effects of 1391 would shape Jewish history for centuries and be felt far beyond the Iberian Peninsula. Indeed, suspicions concerning the Jewishness of the converts that had been surveyed in Halorki’s letter soon arose among the Jews of North Africa, where many conversos sought a haven in which to return openly to Judaism. According to rabbinic tradition, there should have been no impediment to the acceptance of these conversos by other Jewish communities since they fell under the category of anusim and were thus still Jewish in the eyes of Jewish law. More specifically, the Jews among whom the fleeing conversos sought to settle could not require them to undergo the special ritual required of converts to Judaism—namely, a purification bath, circumcision (for men), and a professed willingness to abide by Jewish law— as both the anusim and their descendants remained Jewish. However, when it came to defining the nature of Jewishness, the popular responses to the conversos among the Jews of North Africa did not always bow to rabbinic authority. The classic formulation of the principle behind the concept of anusim is: “A Jew, although he has sinned, remains a Jew.”33 This Talmudic dictum was well known throughout the medieval Jewish world, and there is, perhaps, a tendency to imagine that it represents the standard position of Jewish society regarding the conversos, irrespective of geographical region, time period, or sociopolitical context. Yet closer analysis of rabbinic texts from this era reveals that several of these factors did produce varying Jewish opinions on the matter. Those Jews who had not lived through the persecutions that prompted the mass conversions in Spain and Portugal were less sympathetic to the plight of the conversos, and far less comfortable in accepting rabbinic arguments in support of their continued Jewishness. Since conversos could return openly to Judaism only outside of Iberia, and generally outside of Christian lands, they began to show up in North Arica in significant numbers. The local Jews among whom they sought to settle saw these waves of converso refugees as foreigners whose distinct language, dress, and customs only served to exacerbate doubts regarding their true religious identities. Furthermore, the sheer size of the conversos phenomenon was another important factor in determining popular distrust of the conversos. As with Christian communities, Jews had traditionally found it relatively easy to accept and integrate small numbers of anusim who sought to return to Judaism. However, the appearance of larger groups of conversos posed a serious

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logistical challenge to their reintegration into the relatively small and close-­ knit Jewish communities of the day. Finally, the initial wave of refugees had spent relatively little time as Christians, making it easier for Jews to accept them as beleaguered anusim who were fleeing persecution. But in succeeding decades Jews increasingly saw those conversos who remained in Christian Iberia as having been willing adherents to their new faith, happily accommodating themselves to the social and economic advantages it offered.34 Those Jews who had fled to Muslim lands to practice Judaism openly, even if they themselves had been forcibly converted before they could depart, often harbored a particular bitterness toward those converts who were slower to leave Spain. By the mid-­fifteenth century, declining confidence in the Jewishness of the conversos had taken hold among the Sephardic rabbinic authorities who relocated to North Africa. This suspicion of the religious motives of the conversos, and thus their religious status as Jews, is reflected in the work of Rabbi Solomon ben Simeon Duran, who summarized the situation in the following manner: “It happened some ninety years ago or more, in the land of the Christians, that because of frequent persecutions and forced conversions, many men, women and children converted. And this generation, which converted, although they could have fled to Muslim lands, which is close to them, in order to return to their original faith, they did not flee but remained as Gentiles, and begot sons and daughters who were Gentiles.”35 Duran’s father, Rabbi Simeon Duran, had already begun to make the distinction between earlier converts as still being Jewish and latter-­day conversos as having effectively left the Jewish community. He explains his departure from the legal position held by his predecessors by noting that the tradition of considering converts to be Jewish “only referred to the early converts, who did not desecrate the Sabbath in public. But today, since all of them desecrate the Sabbath publicly, they are not to be trusted at all.” 36 Here the elder Duran distinguished between the early converts for whom acceptance of baptism did not mean the abandonment of Jewish religious practice and a later generation whose continued presence in Christian Spain indicated a more complete accommodation to Christianity. With such statements we begin to see the assertion that Jewish heritage is not sufficient for continued membership in the Jewish community. Rather, Jewishness depended on some level of continued religious observance regardless of a person’s circumstances. Rabbinic authorities thus began to retreat from the legal principle that succeeding generations of conversos were still to be regarded as “forced” converts and thus still Jewish, reflecting a popular mood within the North

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African Jewish communities where many of these conversos sought refuge. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the frustration and ambivalent feelings among Mediterranean Jews over conversos’ reluctance to leave the “lands of idolatry” (i.e., Spain and other Christian lands) and openly commit themselves to Judaism and the Jewish community continued to shape rabbinic proclamations. Benjamin Ze‘ev ben Mattathias, a Jewish legal expert active in the Ottoman Balkans, echoed the frustration and suspicion with converso religiosity that was becoming prevalent throughout Mediterranean Jewish society. He wrote: “We consider them to be Jews so that they may return [to our community], lest we close the doors of repentance before them. But in the strict sense of the law, we should penalize them for staying [in Christian lands] and not returning [to Judaism], and not being concerned about dying there as Gentiles.”37Assertions that the conversos were, in fact, Christians, immediately prompted questions as to if, and how, they would be allowed to join Jewish communities. If they were to be regarded as having left the fold completely, they should be treated the same as any non-­Jew, and asked to undergo the standard conversion rites of circumcision, immersion, and public declaration of faith. And yet, once again, many Jews appeared unable to fully accept their own laws and customs regulating communal boundaries. Even prior to the converso phenomenon, rabbinic authorities had been forced to contend with popular Jewish sentiment that challenged their definitions of Jewishness regarding forced converts. In some parts of Christian Europe, Jewish belief that forced converts had indeed ceased to be Jewish led to a custom of immersion for those seeking to return to full status as Jews. This “de-­baptism” ceremony, although originally seen as contrary to the letter and spirit of Jewish law, gained increasing acceptance among rabbis over the course of the later Middle Ages.38 Furthermore, such rituals appear to have answered a popular call for repentance on the part of those who had left Judaism, regardless of whether the conversions in question had been voluntary. The implication here is that many Jews considered the abandonment of Jewish religious observance, even if it was involuntary, to require public atonement before the convert could reenter the community. In medieval Christian lands, some Jewish authorities demanded female converts to Judaism to undergo a month of fasting as a form of expiation of sin. While the reasons for this ad hoc requirement are not clear, it is likely that it served to demonstrate repentance more forcefully than the standard requirement of a ritual bath.

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Some rabbinic authorities attempted to uphold the traditional Jewish position that forced converts remained Jewish and thus did not need to undergo any formal rituals to reverse the effects of baptism. In thirteenth-­century Barcelona, Solomon ibn Adret acknowledged that public admonition or even flagellation could be incorporated into local ceremonies marking a return to professing Judaism, but he was nonetheless careful not to require such rituals. The main concern here was to avoid giving any credence to the notion that baptism actually effected real change in a Jew’s communal status. However, the Jewish populace in this and later eras seems to have been overwhelmingly convinced that the conversion to Christianity, and living as a Christian, did indeed alter Jewish status.39 Petitions for public displays of repentance and purification to rejoin Jewish society surged in the decades following 1391 as waves of converso refugees arrived in Muslim lands. In Algiers, Rabbi Solomon ben Simeon Duran was moved to write a treatise dedicated to the issue in which he stated that the conversos should undergo a full conversion ritual—as if they were no longer Jewish. Duran’s father had lived through the persecutions of 1391 and fled Spain for North Africa, and his son inherited his dismay that so many of the conversos chose to stay in Spain and live as Christians. His insistence on the need for those of his generation to undergo a full conversion to be accepted as part of Jewish society echoed the popular sentiment that these conversos were, for all intents and purposes, Christians. Such a position was quite striking for the period, and yet Duran’s stipulations about accepting conversos as Jews went even further. He proposed that all converso émigrés who sought to live openly as Jews issue a short statement of faith aimed at mollifying those in the Jewish community who had serious misgivings about their religious motivations. On behalf of the returnee, Duran’s formula beseeched God: “Plant your love and your fear into his heart and open his heart to the Law, and lead him in the path of your commandments, so that he may find grace before you.”40 For many medieval Jews, their community was more than just a part of a larger system of classification—one people among many similar peoples. Rather, it was an example of a supernatural classification of collective identity, divinely determined, and indicative of a shared destiny. As such, maintenance of communal purity was a key issue, as was the related question of repentance as a means of regaining or conferring purity.41 Medieval Jewish communal self-­definition thus reflects an enduring preoccupation with religious categories, and with the notion of sin and purity of the covenantal

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community, even after the advent of converso migration. These concerns emanated from the vox populi, and not just from the abstract debates of scholars. Indeed, in some cities the scholars seemed to echo the concerns of the larger community. The rabbis of Fez rejected claims that the continuing stream of converso émigrés were Jews, arguing that they were Christians who needed to engage in a process of reconversion (Heb. lehitgayyer) to become part of the Jewish community. In a letter responding to this practice, Rabbi Semah ben Solomon Duran, the son of the aforementioned Solomon, carefully corrected these rabbis regarding the notion that these conversos were actually Christians converting to Judaism (gerim). He demanded that they were to be treated as penitents who had never fully left Judaism. The juxtaposition of the two policies regarding the conversos who sought to practice Judaism in Muslim lands gives us a sense of the tensions between legal and popular notions of how to delineate and maintain proper boundaries between religious groups in this tumultuous era.42

* * * The wave of anti-­Jewish violence that swept across much of Iberia in the summer of 1391 represents something of an anomaly. On the one hand, the riots and conversions that took place at this time represent the culmination of longstanding tensions between Christians and Jews. On the other hand, the size, scope, and enduring repercussions of these events were new to Jewish history. The riots of 1391 redrew the map of Iberian Jewry. In Catalonia the Jewish population was devasted, while in other regions, such as Galicia and the Kingdom of Portugal, the Jewish communities emerged intact. The Jews of Ávila and Morvedre also survived the worst of the violence, while communities around them were destroyed. And in some cities, the riots created a complex situation in which significant numbers of Jews and conversos were left to share the same neighborhoods. The complex legacy of 1391 also meant that the triangular relationship among Jews, “New” Christians, and “Old” Christians would take different paths over the course of the fifteenth century. The most educated members of Jewish society enjoyed a certain level of historical perspective regarding their situation and could set the violence and conversion of 1391 into an explanatory framework that preserved the truth of Judaism and faith in the ultimate destiny of the Jewish people. For the majority of Jews of the early fifteenth century, however, such perspective and hopefulness would have been extremely rare. Those born after 1391 had no

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direct knowledge of a world in which conversos did not exist—no memory of a time when their own lives were not intricately bound up with those of the conversos and shaped by Christian fears of heresy and social disorder. And yet we should not conflate the tragedies of 1391 and 1492. Although they now lived within a fundamentally altered social and religious landscape, the Jews of fifteenth-­century Spain would move forward with much the same resilience and pride that had characterized their society for centuries.

CHAPTER 7

Jewish Society in the Fifteenth Century

On March 31, 1492, the united monarchy of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile drafted a decree ordering all “Jews and Jewesses of our kingdoms to depart and never to return.” The edict of expulsion was not formally issued until May 1, leaving the Jews only three months to settle their affairs, sell off their property, and make their way out of their ancestral homeland. Those who were unwilling or unable to make the long, arduous journey into exile would have to accept baptism if they wished to stay in Spain. I begin this last chapter with the awareness that it is nearly impossible to consider the history of Spanish Jewry in the fifteenth century and not think of the impending expulsion. And yet to better understand the factors that led to the crown’s decision to expel the Jews, we need to bear in mind that, for most of the fifteenth century, expulsion was not a foregone conclusion. Perhaps more important, to view the Jewish experience between 1415 and 1492 as little more than an inexorable march toward exile is to obscure much of the detail of Jewish life at this time. Jews continued to live and work as they had before—often struggling, but sometimes achieving successes in a variety of professional and intellectual fields. Older centers dwindled and disappeared, but others emerged, and Jews fanned out into dozens of smaller settlements. In the decades following the Disputation of Tortosa, royal policies generally returned to protecting Jewish rights, and the internal communal strife among factions within Jewish society continued. To be sure, Jews were still condemned for exerting undue influence on Christian society, and whether they were actually true, such accusations were troubling. However, we should not confuse them with the lived reality of fifteenth-­century Jews, even if the former would, eventually, come to shape the latter.

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The New Landscape of Jewish Society In the immediate aftermath of the Disputation of Tortosa, the political and economic foundations of many communities began to collapse. As Jews continued to convert to Christianity, the tax burden on what remained of the Jewish community became more and more unbearable. As a result Jews moved out into smaller towns and villages or to a handful of larger centers. In many towns where Jewish communities had existed for centuries, the last vestiges of Jewish life disappeared entirely. Still, other communities managed to hang on and move forward. After 1415 Christian missionary activity slowed, and in many it places halted altogether. The apocalyptic passion and energy that had driven the push to convert the region’s remaining Jews was now spent. In its place came deep suspicions and bitter jealousies toward the New Christians who, now in their second and third generations, were still considered “Jews” by the majority of the Christian populace. Problematic as this turn in public opinion was, the shift in focus toward the conversos offered professing Jews something of a respite. It also eased the pressure to accept baptism. The generation that had converted in the wake of 1391 to maintain their family ties had died, and the fear engendered by the era of Tortosa had been replaced by the bitter perception that conversion was not a solution worth pursuing. The total number of Jews in a given locale and their percentages of the overall populations in the towns and cities where they lived continued to wax and wane over the course of the fifteenth century. In some places there were almost no Jews, while in others they made up as much as 15 to 25 percent of the population. These percentages were also a factor in how they related to, and were treated by, the local Christian community. In Castile there was a demographic shift in the Jewish population from longstanding centers such as Seville, Burgos, and Toledo to a constellation of smaller settlements. Part of this was due to the depopulation caused by the riots and conversions of the turn of the century, and part was an effort by Jews to seek out new lords with greater ability to protect their Jewish subjects. In the Palencia region of northern Castile, the Jewish community of Paredes de Nava appealed to the Jews of nearby Torremormojón for money in a desperate attempt to keep themselves afloat. Their efforts ultimately failed, and the Jewish settlement in Paredes soon disappeared.1 The instability of older Jewish settlements and promise of better social and economic conditions elsewhere continued to spur Jewish emigration for decades after 1391. As late as 1450, the Castilian crown still noted with great

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displeasure the ongoing process of Jews abandoning royal lands for territories controlled by various members of the nobility or for other kingdoms altogether.2 The influx of Jewish settlers to noble lands (tierras de señorio) coincided with the general rise of noble power against a series of weak kings during the first half of the fifteenth century. As a result of these interconnected developments, more and more Jewish life took place in small towns and villages, few of which were able to support full communities with the sorts of social and religious services often deemed necessary for medieval Jewish life. The aljama of Toledo, formerly the leading light of Jewish communities in the kingdom and one of the most illustrious rabbinic centers in all of Europe, had lost its stature. Although the aljama survived the riots, it was greatly diminished and would never regain the economic or intellectual importance it once held. In the tax records from 1439 and 1464, its contributions were less than that of the Jewish community of Ocaña, and slightly more than that of Máqueda, neither of which even approached Toledo’s wealth in previous centuries.3 Likewise in Andalusia, where the riots of 1391 originated, the Jewish communities had been devastated. In the province of Jaén, a tax list drawn up in 1439 shows that the Jewish communities of Úbeda and Andújar were the only ones to have survived the attacks. By the 1460s, even these had disappeared.4 The situation was generally better in the north of Castile, where several Jewish centers maintained or increased their prominence. The aljama of Ávila developed into one of the largest in the kingdom, with somewhere between 264 and 285 Jewish families by the 1480s. Other large and economically important aljamas in Castile included those of Murcia, Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo, Segovia, and Zamora.5 In Zamora the Jews kept their old Jewish quarter but spread out to a judería nueva at the end of the fifteenth century, most likely due to immigration from other parts of the kingdom. On the eve of the expulsion, Jews were at least 15 percent of the population of Zamora; maybe nine hundred or more out of a total population of six thousand. Zamora also developed into one of the premier rabbinic centers of the fifteenth century, as will be discussed in what follows. But Jewish life in Castile during the last decades before the expulsion was typified by smaller Jewish communities and peripatetic centers of little intellectual life. Jews continued to find homes in small-­to medium-­sized cities, making contributions to the local economy and staying connected to one another through social networks. They were, however, also bound to the largest local aljamas through the system of tax collection (collectas).

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In Galicia tax registers show a population of 190 Jewish families in the region in 1464, which then declined to 33 families in the years just prior to the expulsion. The only significant Jewish centers in the region were those of Ourense and Ribadavia. In the remote western province of Estremadura, the aljama of Cáceres had a population of about 130 Jews in 1479.6 Likewise, Jews continued to live in the towns and cities on both sides of the Castilian-­ Navarrese border. Haro and Nájera continued to house Jewish communities of about 40 to 50 families, and Alfaro had about 70 families. The Jewish community of Tudela had declined since its height in the fourteenth century but still managed to sustain a population of about 800 during the fifteenth century.7 The situation was much the same throughout the Crown of Aragon, with Jews choosing between the relative safety of smaller towns and villages and a much-­reduced number of viable communities in larger centers. The Jewish population of the Kingdom of Valencia had been decimated. With the once great Jewish community in the city of Valencia now completely destroyed, small Jewish settlements struggled to hang on in towns like Castelló, Borriana, and Vila-­real. One exception in the region was the town of Morvedre, which was home to a small but vibrant Jewish community that numbered about 50 households by mid-­century.8 In the Aragonese town of Daroca, the Jewish community ceased to exist sometime around 1415. The last Jews who had survived years of hostility fled their homes, seeking safe haven in nearby villages of Cariñena, Luco, Anento, and Burbáguena. These settlements were still under royal jurisdiction; these were likely Jews of little means who fled as far as they could, simply hoping for the best and awaiting a possible return to their native cities. Eventually, they (or their descendants) did find their way back to Daroca. A new community was officially reestablished there in 1458 by order of Juan II of Aragon, and a new synagogue and communal officers soon followed. In the Aragonese town of Monzón, tax records from 1451 list 147 Jewish families. This number is more than double the population listed during the 1390s, a result of a process of immigration and consolidation of Jews from smaller towns and villages in the area. Jews in search of a larger, more stable community also flowed into the royal capital of Saragossa, which became a destination for many homeless Jews. Others preferred to remain in the small communities in its vicinity, such as Tauste, Alagón, Pina, Fuentes, Mallén, Sástago, and Caspe. Larger Jewish communities that witnessed steady if modest growth in the decades after the Disputation of

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Tortosa included those of Girona and Tarazona, which saw their populations rebound during this period as immigration caused them to expand their Jewish quarters during the 1440s and 1450s.9 One of the key factors in the recovery of Jewish communal life was the increased interest in safeguarding Jewish rights demonstrated by the respective rulers of the crowns of Aragon and Castile. Many ecclesiastics and city councils continued to direct their energies toward the conversion or demoralization of their local Jewish populations, and the separation of these Jews from their Christian neighbors. But royal enthusiasm for such programs waned, and Jewish leaders found that their appeals for protection from the crown once again were proving successful. Thus when nobles and municipal officials tried to interfere in Jewish affairs and punish them for not wearing the required badge, Jews were able to fight back against such measures by reminding the royal bailiff that only he had jurisdiction over them. Similarly, the attempt to expel the Jews from the Catalonian city of Tarragona in 1417 was rebuffed by the crown, signaling a fundamental shift in royal policy toward the Jews only three years after the Disputation of Tortosa.10 And the royal defense of the Jews of Tarragona was no exception. That same year, King Alfonso V took measures to reorganize the Jewish community of Saragossa, Aragon’s largest, in an effort to set it on a firmer political and economic footing. And when a Valencian noble attempted to control where Jewish merchants might sell their wares by banning them from traveling through a particular region, the Jews successfully complained to the king that this restriction on their movement and mercantile activity was contrary to the rights long guaranteed to them in the charter (furs) of Valencia.11 In Castile, King Juan II forcefully maintained centralized royal protection of and control over the Jewish communities as a response to efforts by friars and local concejos to restrict Jewish rights. During his long reign (1416–58), Alfonso V showed relatively little interest in converting, or even just harassing, his Jewish subjects, reversing the royal policy that had embittered Jewish life in the Crown of Aragon for decades. Alfonso spent much of his reign in Italy, where he also ruled as king of Naples. To the extent that he paid attention to the Jews in the Crown of Aragon at all, it was to follow a more traditional policy of royal support, seeking to promote the reorganization and general welfare of the region’s surviving Jewish communities. He officially repealed the harsh anti-­Jewish legislation instituted by his father at the urging of Vicente Ferrer, abandoning the official goal of abolishing Judaism via conversion. Alfonso’s wife,

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Queen María of Castile, repeatedly protested against preachers who sought to incite violence against the Jews. While she recognized the rights of friars to deliver sermons to her Jewish subjects, she strenuously objected to tactics that threatened forced conversion or otherwise infringed on Jewish rights. Alfonso’s brother and successor, Juan II (1458–79), continued this return to a more traditional treatment of the Jews, in large part by leaving Jewish affairs in the hands of the bailiff general. This post, charged with guarding the royal patrimony, was occupied by successive generations of the Mercader family, who tended to treat the Jews as valuable subjects of the royal treasury rather than potential converts. While efforts were still made to prevent judaizing among the conversos, the crown showed little interest in breaking the existing socioeconomic links between Jews and conversos, as for example, inhibiting Jewish trade networks that included converso artisans, merchants, and brokers. In 1438 the queen allowed the Jews of Cervera to open the gates between their quarter and the neighboring Christian district, officially reversing earlier policies meant to separate Jews and Christians.12 The return of royal protection also manifested itself in the protection of Jewish rights; the crown again exempted certain Jews from paying certain taxes or having to wear the distinguishing badge. The Jews of Aragon and Valencia once again found, in the crown and the bailiff general, reliable guardians who would intervene on their behalf against municipal and church officials in defense of their rights. After decades of harassment and uncertainty, the Jews’ prosperity was once again linked to that of the crown. Under Juan II, the Jews of Xàtiva were granted a five-­year moratorium on paying debts and allowed to add the royal coat of arms to the entrance to their synagogue in a clear display of royal support. 13 Finally, another policy shift that aided the recuperation of Jewish communal life in the Crown of Aragon was the significant curtailment in the demands of the royal treasury. Excessive extraordinary taxes had wreaked havoc on the stability of Jewish aljamas for much of the fourteenth century. Under Alfonso V these were replaced by more moderate demands, levied far less frequently.14 To be sure, the surviving Jewish communities in the Crown of Aragon were few and, in most areas, greatly diminished. Nonetheless, during the middle decades of the fifteenth century, these Jews were able to prosper, reestablish their communities, and even strengthen ties to converso friends and relatives without significant opposition.

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The Jewish Community Between Reform and Revolt Royal efforts to safeguard Jewish rights notwithstanding, a general environment of political instability prevailed in much of Iberia and greatly inhibited the recovery of Hispano-­Jewish society. During the middle decades of the fifteenth century, intense political factionalism wracked Spain at both the local and regional levels. In Castile tensions between a perennially weak crown and an emboldened aristocracy generated political chaos, until the ascendancy of Queen Isabella and her marriage to Ferdinand II of Aragon established royal authority in the 1470s. The Jewish aljamas that attempted to regroup during the early fifteenth century did so against this fractious political background. Moreover, Jewish communal leaders were forced to confront the longstanding factionalism and discord within their own communities. Several larger aljamas continued to be divided along class lines, with various manos complaining of political disenfranchisement.15 In nearly all communities, the internal divisions in Jewish society and conflict over fiscal mismanagement and political corruption were major obstacles to the reestablishment of stable Jewish governments. In many towns Jews were more dependent than ever on royal intervention in Jewish communal affairs. In Saragossa, then the last major Jewish center left in the Crown of Aragon, years of internal revolt followed the death of Hasdai Crescas in 1410. Crescas had succeeded in holding the fractious community together during the turbulence of the 1390s and beyond but failed to establish a communal leadership that could survive without his diplomatic skills. The ongoing factionalism in Saragossa was a major subject for Jewish poets like Solomon Bonafed. Bonafed colorfully depicted divisions between the mano mayor and the mano menor, launching particularly acerbic attacks against the leadership of Rabbi Joshua Galuf ibn Joseph.16 The situation deteriorated until Alfonso V intervened, calling for the political reorganization of the aljama. Recognizing the “tribulations and anguish” that the Jews had suffered in recent years, the king charged the local Jewish notable, Vidal de la Cavalleria, to restructure the government of the Jewish community in order to depose the current leadership of the menestrales (artisans), and to address the complaints of fiscal corruption of the previous leadership.17 These efforts appear to have been unsuccessful, and in 1438 King Alfonso once again intervened in an attempt to remedy the “tyranny and abuses” of the aljama’s officers. Jewish self-­government in Saragossa, however, remained plagued by accusations of corruption, tax fraud, and irregularities in the election of communal

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administrators. Various members of the community appealed to royal officials during the 1450s and 1480s in an attempt to bring about a semblance of order to a fundamentally unstable political system. Clearly, the upheaval of the riots and forced conversions of 1391 had exacerbated political tensions within Jewish society, creating an atmosphere of mutual mistrust from which the Jews never fully recovered. Indeed, over the course of the fifteenth century, Jews in Saragossa and elsewhere would find it easier to move on from the external threats of Christian mobs than from the divisions and rivalries within their own communities. Internecine fighting among Jews regularly erupted into violence as Jews sought to intimidate one another, defend their honor, and exact revenge on their rivals. In 1432 Jafuda Maymó of Morvedre was granted a safe-­conduct that allowed him to carry a sword and shield throughout Valencia. His reason for this request was that he feared attack by two Jewish brothers, a certain Samuel and Abraham Agi, in retaliation for a lawsuit he had brought against them.18 Evidence of Jews menacing each other in this way can be gleaned from towns across the peninsula. In the province of Cáceres, a Jew named Yucef Gigante was stabbed to death in 1476 by another Jew, also named Yucef, prompting his sister to write to the queen for justice.19 Seven years later, a similar attack took place in Miranda de Ebro when Abraham Habillo stabbed Rabbi Hospina, a judge of the local aljama, as he left the synagogue. Hospina survived the attack and demanded that the crown’s decision to execute Habillo be implemented without delay.20 Such strife was largely a product of the breakdown of law and order in so many Jewish communities, and repeated efforts at Jewish political reform came to depend on aid and guidance from Christian society. In Huesca, for instance, the system of Jewish self-­government came to parallel that of the Christian municipality of the city. This was a slow and difficult process, beset by internal strife along the way. Originally Jewish officers had been elected by a small group and then confirmed by the crown. Now this shifted to a more democratic system, allowing for candidates to be drawn from a wider cross-­section of the Jewish community. These reforms came in 1445, a few years after a similar process was adopted in Saragossa, and about twenty-­five years after it had taken hold in Xàtiva. The king commanded a similar system be adopted by the Jews of Girona in 1458.21 Throughout this era Jews appealed their cases to royal judges and received justice, a fact that underscores both the Jews’ dependence on the crown and the latter’s willingness to defend Jewish rights. The general destabilization of Jewish communal governments also encouraged those with connections to the crown to flout the authority of their

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local kahal. In many cases Jews of means would first address their grievances to royal officials, only involving Jewish communal authorities if they could not find satisfaction. Even then it was not uncommon for Christian officials to reinsert themselves in such cases, demanding that Jewish authorities stay out of the matter, in a clear attack on Jewish communal autonomy. Powerful Jewish leaders sought to curtail such blatant disregard for Jewish law, threatening fines and even excommunication for those Jews who did not respect the jurisdiction of Jewish judges. But as long as royal officials were willing to intervene, such threats proved hollow.22 At other times the crown became directly involved in the appointment of Jewish communal officers. Such was the case in 1460, when King Juan II of Aragon ordered the representatives of the Jewish aljama of Huesca to overcome their differences and elect a new rabbi. The king, obviously acting in response to a Jewish petition, supported Isaac Arrundí for the position over the incumbent rabbi, ostensibly because the former was a native of Huesca and the latter was not.23 In Saragossa, the infante Juan interceded on behalf of Juce ben Josua to ensure that he was the sole rabbi of the community. In both cases the crown’s decision appears to have been influenced by Jewish lobbying. In Castile royal intervention in Jewish communal affairs was less common, or at least less direct. One of the key reasons for this was that the Castilian royal court continued to employ a number of prominent Jews as physicians, tax-­collectors, and financial advisors, whereas in the Crown of Aragon such Jewish courtiers had been almost completely replaced by conversos. As a result the Castilian crown’s intervention in the local political and economic life of Jewish aljamas often took place through Jewish courtiers, who acted as intermediaries between the king and his Jewish subjects. In both Castile and the Crown of Aragon, Jewish elites continued to draw on their wealth and connections to non-­Jewish authorities to set themselves apart from the rest of their community. They pursued honor and power just as their Christian counterparts did, and zealously guarded their personal status. One way to emphasize their elevated social position was by obtaining exemptions from a variety of fiscal and social obligations, from paying taxes to wearing the Jewish badge. Another was the use of titles that recognized their stature in society. Both Jewish and Christian sources regularly referred to Jewish elites by their titles, from the honorific “don” (or “en”) for important men, to titles indicating a learned authority, such as “rab” or its Latin and Romance equivalents, “magister” and “maestre.” More than honor was at stake in the Christian recognition of Jewish titles. Designations such as

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“maestre” or “rab” often accompanied more explicit recognition of authority, as when the Aragonese infante, Juan, granted a certain Jew named Maestre Jahuda Figueruela of Daroca the right to excommunicate any other Jews who caused him injury by word or deed. The infante’s letter indicates that, as far as he was concerned, these powers stem from Jahuda’s position as rabbi.24 Wealthy and learned elites had always dominated medieval Jewish society. As Jewish communities struggled to regroup during the mid-­fifteenth century, their dependence on a reduced number of rich and powerful Jews only increased. After 1391 Jewish public institutions, to the extent that they existed at all, relied heavily on the philanthropy of the wealthy. Many of these Jewish elites left no mark on the Jewish intellectual tradition and thus have not achieved the fame enjoyed by those who did. Students of Jewish history tend to know the names Judah Halevi, Nahmanides, and Abravanel, whereas the vast majority of the Jewish grandees who supported and dominated communal life are known only to a handful of historians. Yet for Jews in medieval Spain, local elites and great courtiers were important figures indeed. During the fifteenth century dynasties such as the Avincacez family in Huesca, the Agay family in Torremormojón, Menahem Çidre in Illescas and Madrid, and Mosé Tamaño of Ávila loomed large in the daily lives of the Jews of their respective regions. In the years of reorganization and recovery of Jewish society following 1415, no figure loomed larger than Don Abraham Bienveniste. Bienveniste rose to prominence amid political chaos and palace intrigue. In July of 1420, Prince Enrique of Aragon captured the fourteen-­year-­old King of Castile, Juan II, in Tordesillas in an attempted coup, setting in motion nearly sixty years of civil war and political instability in Castile. The young king eventually escaped with the help of the Christian courtier Don Álvaro de Luna. From that moment on, De Luna became a royal favorite, quickly rising in status and influence to become the most powerful man in Castile. His rise to power had particular import for Castilian Jewry, and for the influential Jews associated with the royal court. At the time of De Luna’s rise to power, Bienveniste had already served Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, the chief steward (mayordomo mayor) in charge of the royal household, who appears to have recommended him for the position of royal treasurer. King Juan II was a minor and took little interest in governing even as he came of age. It was thus Álvaro de Luna who assumed control of the Castilian court, and who later elevated Bienveniste to the post of royal treasurer. Bienveniste proved himself to be a capable administrator and astute political actor in the mold of some of the greatest Jewish courtiers of the

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Middle Ages. He also headed a powerful family network that stretched from his native Soria to Burgos, Guadalajara, and Saragossa. His influence at court also made him powerful enemies, who attacked his Jewish background as a danger to the morality and honor of the kingdom. For many the rise of De Luna and, with him, Abraham Bienveniste, signaled the unwanted return of the Jews to positions of influence, particularly with regard to tax farming. The Cortes that met in Ávila in September 1420 attempted to reassert the now-­defunct Laws of Ayllón from 1412, which had excluded Jews from the collection of royal taxes. Here we can see a growing chasm between an embattled crown, which saw the Jews as beneficial, and almost every other estate (cities, the nobility, and the church), who increasingly saw them as detrimental. These longstanding tensions regarding the Jews’ status were now exacerbated by the conversos’ expansion into many of the key economic roles formerly held by Jews, and the subsequent decline in the importance of the Jews to the royal treasury.25 Bienveniste’s ability to maintain a central role at the embattled court of Juan II would also have important consequences for the Jews of Castile. The king named Bienveniste rab mayor de la corte (chief rabbi, or chief Jewish minister) for all of Castile, a position had been left vacant since the death of Meir Alguadex in 1410. The reestablishment of the post of rab de la corte, and the detailed description of his jurisdiction over all Jews of the kingdom, be they in cities, villages, on lands of the nobility, and so forth, must be seen as part of a wider program initiated by Álvaro de Luna to forcibly reassert royal power. But Bienveniste also saw the reestablishment of this post as an opportunity to reorganize Castilian Jewry and to assert his own authority over the kingdom’s aljamas. His tenure as rab de la corte represents the last great attempt at social and political reform of Spanish Jewry, and an illustration of the ongoing tension between Jewish courtiers and local communities. In the immediate aftermath of the riots of 1391, the great scholar and communal leader Hasdai Crescas had worked tirelessly to shore up the infrastructure of Jewish society in Castile, Valencia, and Provence, as well as in his home kingdom of Aragon. He succeeded in preserving a viable Jewish center in Saragossa, but his efforts elsewhere in the Crown of Aragon met with failure. In Castile, too, Jewish society remained geographically dispersed and politically decentralized. Jews had fled many of the larger cities, seeking safety in sleepy villages and small towns. For forty years there were no significant efforts exerted toward political recovery and advancement, only toward survival.

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It was not until 1432 that there was a concerted effort to reorganize Castilian Jewry through the establishment of supracommunal legislation known as the takkanot (ordinances) of Valladolid. Abraham Bienveniste was the driving force behind the takkanot. The king appointed Bienveniste rab de la corte in 1431, imbuing him with broad powers to judge and collect taxes from all the Jews of Castile. Immediately on his elevation to this post, Bienveniste convened a meeting of prominent and learned Jews from around the kingdom at the great synagogue of Valladolid. The goals of these new communal ordinances appear to have been twofold. First, the ambitious scope of the legislation of 1432 is a sign that Castilian Jewry had finally reached a point of stability that might allow it to move forward under the auspices of Juan II and his chief minister, De Luna. Second, and perhaps more important, the Valladolid accords represent Bienveniste’s attempt to extend his own authority and power over his fellow Jews. In particular the takkanot display a concern that Jews pay taxes to the crown. Jews appeared to be abandoning their fiscal obligations by fleeing their home communities, thus increasing the burden on those taxpayers who remained and making it difficult for royal tax-­gatherers (like Bienveniste) to collect the full amount. The takkanot—especially the complaints against wealthy Jews across Castile seeking to exempt themselves to the detriment of the Jewish poor in their communities—clearly reflect the interests of the crown and its chief tax-­collector. While the need for Jewish social and political reform was real and significant, so too was the benefit that this legislation would have for both Bienveniste and the royal court. Bienveniste’s plan to create one set of regulations for all Jewish communities of the kingdom was extremely innovative but, as it turned out, impossible to realize. While the ordinances were never fully put into effect, they nonetheless afford us a window into the concerns and attitudes of communal leaders at this time. The majority of the takkanot were dedicated to issues of self-­government and proper legal and political procedures, especially the establishment of judges and the assessment of taxes. They were divided into five sections that addressed schools and synagogues, courts, defamation and denunciations, taxes, festivities, and clothing. The ordinances insisted that communities of fifteen families or more pay for at least one primary school teacher, and that those of forty families hire at least one rabbi for the instruction of Talmud and halakhah. They also sought to establish at least one house of prayer in every Jewish community of ten families or more: “They shall either buy or hire a house for that purpose so that they may not interrupt the prayers even for a single day. And we ordain that in those places which

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have twenty families or less a fine shall be imposed on anyone who fails to come to public prayers in the morning or evening, unless he is prevented by some valid reason.”26 Such demands may have displayed the piety of Bienveniste and his supporters, but they were perhaps too ambitious. The creation and maintenance of so many synagogues would have been difficult even in earlier generations when Jewish communities were less dispersed and stood on firmer fiscal foundations. Equally ambitious was the attempt to mandate universal attendance at morning and afternoon prayer sessions. The problems of weakened communal structures, finances, and leadership that confronted Castilian Jews at this time only exacerbated the struggle against the impiety and laziness of certain individuals that all religious leaders traditionally waged. Indeed, the takkanot also took steps to curtail congregants’ acts of violence in synagogues, including stabbing and bludgeoning. Likewise, the section dealing with defamation and those who make false accusations against fellow Jews to the Christian authorities reminds us that such longstanding concerns of Jewish leadership were still a problem. The takkanot generally left each individual community to develop its own standards regarding the regulation of dress and expenditures associated with festive celebrations. Nonetheless, they admonished each community to err on the side of humility and piety. To this end they also attempted to curtail the regular use of rich fabrics, styles, and colors, such as the use of gold thread, jewels, and high collars, making exceptions for celebratory occasions. In this regard they followed the sumptuary laws imposed on Jews by Christian lords.27 The framers of the takkanot also tried to impose taxes on Jewish life-­cycle events, such as weddings, circumcisions, and burials, in the hope of raising a steady revenue stream to support schools. Interestingly, those communities that already supported a learned religious scholar as their rabbi, rather than a court rabbi or similar powerful figure, were granted an exemption from this new tax policy. Here we see echoes of communal reluctance—or financial incapacity—to support centers of higher education. Jews in many, if not most communities, would have been used to living without an expert in Jewish law. Indeed, the failure to truly implement the takkanot of 1432 highlights the considerable disparity between the social ideals of Jewish leaders and the lived experience of most Jews. Such sweeping reforms would have been difficult to implement at the best of times, as there was no mechanism for enforcing them over such a wide territory. Their failure at this time only highlights the ongoing disfunction and decentralization of Jewish society.

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Although the crown appears to have supported Bienveniste’s attempt at reforming and reorganizing Castilian Jewish society, it did so primarily to strengthen royal control over the Jewish aljamas. This position became increasingly clear on Bienveniste’s death, when the king appointed his Christian chamberlain, Pedro de Luján, as the new “rab” of Castilian Jewry. While King Juan clearly saw the religion of the “chief rabbi” to be of little importance, his Jewish subjects considered the appointment of Luján as an intolerable infringement of their rights. The king eventually relented, removing Luján from the post and allowing representatives from the aljamas to draw up a list of candidates from which he might select a more appropriate successor for chief rabbi. The group of five Jewish notables that emerged took over the collection of royal taxes from Castile’s Jewish communities. Among them was Bienveniste’s son, Yuçaf, and two royal physicians who came to hold the position of chief rabbi: Samaya Alubel and Jacob aben Nuñes.28 As both the takkanot of Valladolid and the limits of their impact make clear, Jewish communal life continued to be turbulent throughout the fifteenth century. Jews relied on personal connections to both Christians and other Jews to survive. Although they spread out into new towns and villages, families, friends, merchants, and intellectuals remained in close contact with one another. The social networks they maintained proved particularly important for mutual aid, at a time when local communal governments were often weak and unreliable. Wealthy Jews allied themselves with rich families from other locales—in a pattern similar to that of wealthy Christians—rather than to poorer families from their own aljamas. This was the case, for instance, of the great Castilian courtier Abraham Seneor of Segovia, who married his daughter to Rabbi Yuçef Açamahas of Ávila, an important tax farmer there.29 The status of individual Jews and the degree to which they were connected to their local Christian lords and concejos varied from place to place. Some Jews were considered vecinos, or legal residents, with clear rights and obligations to the local aljama as well as the Christian municipality. Others, who lived outside larger centers with their full aljamas, or whose settlement in the town was not permanent, were treated as residents (moradores). For instance, the important Leonese city of Salamanca, which became a major university center in the early thirteenth century, was home to a full Jewish aljama. This aljama was fiscally responsible for Jews living in several small surrounding towns, such as Monleón, Texeda, Santiago de la Puebla, San Muñoz, Tamanes, and Peñaranda. The isolated Jews living in these predominantly Christian outposts had access to few, if any, communal resources, such

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as synagogues or schools, kosher butchers, even Jewish cemeteries. Jewish life in these smaller centers—even in mid-­sized communities—was thus fundamentally different from Jewish life in those towns and cities that boasted communities with full sociopolitical infrastructures. The largest Jewish aljamas had more than a hundred Jewish families, multiple synagogues, havarot in charge of various social and religious activities, and more. Movement between larger and smaller Jewish settlements increased at various points during the fifteenth century as individual Jewish families were forced to choose between the benefits of stable communities and the financial contributions such communities required. In the bishoprics of Ciudad Rodrigo and Salamanca, for instance, tax records show that the amount collected from Jews between 1485 and 1486 declined sharply, from 48,985 to 10,917 mrs. Some fled the area, perhaps looking to escape rising taxes, while others might have left the kingdom entirely, heading to the Kingdom of Portugal as Jewish-­Christian relations in Castile began to deteriorate. But long-­ distance emigration was not viable for most. A more common response to fiscal and religious pressures in larger cities was to move to nearby towns and villages in the hopes of waiting out the crises. Indeed, some smaller settlements, such as Monleón, continued to grow at this time, reaching the status of an independent aljama by 1490.30

The Jewish Economy The riots and mass conversions of the turn of the century seriously undermined the fiscal stability of Jewish communities. The ongoing conversions of Jews were particularly damaging to the upper echelons of Jewish society. Jewish lending, which had already begun to decline, was further reduced by the loss of wealth and destruction of Jewish loan records. As a result the Jewish economy of the fifteenth century was even more skewed toward the crafts and small-­scale trade than it had been. None of these altered the fundamental structure of Jewish economic life, however. For the most part Jews continued to work in the same professions as before the riots. In all regions of the peninsula, Jews remained prominent in the manufacture and trade of textiles and leather goods, holding jobs as weavers, tailors, embroiderers, cloth-­shearers, tanners, dyers, and shoemakers. These were the same low-­paying and low-­status jobs they occupied throughout the late medieval period in both Islamic and Christian societies.31 Another important

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area of Jewish artisanal activity was in the fabrication of various metal products. Jewish merchants and peddlers traded in a range of metal objects, from jewelry, bells, chains, and farm tools to weapons of various kinds. Jews were particularly well known as silversmiths, and the aljama of Morvedre became the center of Jewish silverwork in Valencia. In Segovia a Jewish blacksmith named Yuçe Biton became a converso and continued to serve the local cathedral by making clappers, nails, and staples.32 Indeed Jews were predominant in forging and blacksmithing in Segovia and elsewhere, as well as in gold-­ and silversmithing. Other Segovian Jews appear in the cathedral archives as tailors and other areas of the needle trades, mending liturgical vestments and old clothes. A smaller sector of the Jewish workforce also participated in direct agriculture. Some Jews worked as day-­laborers while others employed Christians to work as tenant farmers on their lands.33 Jewish lending was linked to rent-­collecting; they were now dominated by a small handful of family dynasties. Most Jewish lenders tended to issue small-­scale loans to local peasants, provoking the same tensions and anxieties that had strained interfaith relations throughout the previous century. Jews acted as rent-­and debt-­collectors for municipalities, military orders, cathedral chapters, and nobles, as well as for the crown. In Castile, in particular, Christian lords remained dependent on Jewish tax-­collectors up until 1492. But this enterprise too, like large-­scale lending, was in the hands of only a few family networks and far from the experience of most Jews. During the 1430s Salomón Baquix of Hita (a town northeast of Madrid) was hired to farm taxes in the bishopric of Ourense, Galicia, some four hundred miles to the west. Baquix operated as a part of a larger tax-­gathering network, centered in other parts of the kingdom, which employed both Christians and Jews.34 In the territories of the Crown of Aragon, the Jews continued to be involved in lending, albeit on a diminished scale. The disappearance of prominent Jewish communities in cities such as Barcelona, Mallorca, and Valencia, combined with increased Christian lending through the expanded use of the censal as a financial tool, functionally ended many of the familiar complaints against Jewish usury. Many of the Christians who took over these forms of lending were conversos. In Castile, where the censal was not adopted, Jewish lending was also reduced, and Christians, including conversos, engaged in lending at interest. But unlike in the neighboring territories to the east, Castilian Christians still complained of Jewish usury and the unscrupulous tactics of Jewish tax-­collectors. Indeed, many among the Castilian nobility continued to attack royal authority by condemning royal protection of Jews

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and conversos, even though many Jews had abandoned the royal domains and moved to towns under noble control. Jewish involvement in the field of medicine was still conspicuous, and Jewish doctors continued to serve Christian clients, despite tensions between their communities. In Tortosa a petition by the city’s bishop to forbid Jewish and Muslim doctors from ministering to Christian patients was quickly rejected by the crown.35 Municipal concejos still valued the services of Jewish physicians, offering them tax exemptions as incentives to attract them to their towns. In Ourense, Abraham Comineto de Billalon was hired as a physician for five years and was given tax breaks instead of a salary. Jewish communities offered similar contracts. Demand sometimes exceeded the supply of available Jewish doctors. In 1434 the Jewish aljama of Zamora complained of having to spend too much on physicians and surgeons. As with tax farming, the medical profession simultaneously integrated the upper stratum of the Jewish community into the broader Christian society and distanced these Jews from others in their communities. Both tax-­collectors and physicians were regularly exempted from the clothing, travel, and lodging restrictions that were otherwise enforced on Jews. Jacob aben Nuñes, a courtier under Enrique IV who was appointed as juez mayor (another formulation of “chief rabbi”) over all Castilian Jewry, also held the position, for a time, of municipal physician of Madrid. In addition to tax privileges, Aben Nuñes was also exempted from wearing the Jewish badge. Like Aben Nuñes, many Jewish doctors held other jobs from which they earned the majority of their income. The same was true for rabbis and other communal officials. In Ávila, Simuel Çerulla, the local surgeon, was one of the larger Jewish lenders in the city, and the cantor of the community, Abraham Abenaçay, made his living selling wine to Christian innkeepers.36 Some Jewish merchants continued to be involved in long-­distance trade, albeit on a more modest scale, which put them behind Christian merchants. They often hired Christians to help transport their wares. The crown continued to promote Jewish rights to free and unmolested travel at all times (including on Sundays and Christian holidays), until their expulsion at the close of the fifteenth century.37 In addition to cloth, leather, and metal products, Jews also traded in agricultural goods—especially wheat, barley, dates, and animal hides—as well as in luxury items such as ostrich plumes and gold from sub-­Saharan Africa, and incense and indigo that had been imported to the Maghreb from the far East. In Castile, Jewish merchants still participated in local fairs, such as those held at Medina del Campo. In the Kingdom of

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Valencia, they continued to trade with Mallorca and the Maghreb as part of an important triangle of trade that reinforced ties between Jewish and converso communities. Indeed, converso merchants still tended to trade with the merchants they knew and trusted, which still tended to be the Jews. This was done both out of trust and out of exclusion on the part of other Christian merchants. In Valencia, at least, conversion did not bring with it access to the more profitable sectors of trade that remained in the hands of Old Christians and prominent Muslims.38

Intellectual and Religious Life Histories that focus on the Jewish experience in fifteenth-­century Spain merely as a path to expulsion miss much of the vibrancy of Jewish religious and intellectual life. While the cataclysmic events of the period between 1391 and 1415 dealt a major blow to Jewish learning and intellectual life, the thread of Jewish scholarship in medieval Spain was never severed.39 Indeed, Hasdai Crescas, who died in Saragossa around 1410, managed to produce his philosophical magnum opus, Or Adonai (The Light of the Lord), during the unprecedented upheaval of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Crescas’s disciple, Joseph Albo, wrote his own masterful synthesis of philosophy and exegesis, Sefer ha-­‘Ikkarim (The Book of Principles), in 1425. Writing in a period when conversos were helping enable communication between Jewish and Christian scholars, Albo was at the forefront of a trend in Jewish learning in which writers drew on the Christian scholasticism of Aquinas and others to articulate and defend the truth of Judaism. A key part of this phenomenon appears to have been the ongoing connection between leading Jewish scholars and converso intellectuals, especially those of the first generation, many of whom continued to write works aimed at Jewish audiences. One such prominent example of this phenomenon was Profayt Duran, who lived the last twenty-­four years of his life as a nominal Christian, Honoratus de Bonafide, but who nonetheless remained part of Jewish intellectual circles. Duran displayed an awareness of and engagement with Christian scholasticism and used it to offer trenchant critiques of late-­medieval Christianity and the degree to which it had departed from its own origins. Such ties also prompted a new wave of translations from Latin and Romance languages into Hebrew during the fifteenth century, and knowledge of Latin

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eventually became widespread among Jewish scholars. The Aragonese philosopher and translator Eli Habillo, wrote: “In many places, I quote the Latin expressions for two reasons: First, if a reader had difficulty in understanding the meaning, he could ask a Christian scholar to explain it to him; second, as these expressions are not used in the vernacular language, the reader would have difficulty in translating them into this language.”40 The works of Aristotle and Maimonides continued to serve as inspiration for Jewish authors, who generally accepted that philosophical principles were a valid means of addressing fundamental theological concerns. Many Jewish scholars thus continued to employ philosophy as a lens through which their religious tradition could be understood. Others, such as Solomon Alami, Hayyim ibn Musa, and Joseph Yavetz, renewed another longstanding tradition: the condemnation of philosophy’s corrosive effects on Jewish piety, although the intensity of these intellectual disputes was generally more subdued than in earlier periods. For more than two hundred years, opponents of philosophical trends within Judaism had warned that “foreign” elements threatened to undermine Jewish tradition and belief. The anonymous kabbalistic work Sefer ha-­meshiv (The Book of the Answering Angel) attacked the use of philosophy precisely because of its increased influence on Talmudic interpretation. By the fifteenth century some viewed the devastating impact of the recent mass conversions as proof positive of this longstanding critique. Mysticism also continued to be an important and divisive trend within Jewish culture. The creativity that had energized various circles of Sephardic kabbalists during the thirteenth century would not be duplicated until after the expulsion. Nonetheless, Kabbalah had achieved a permanent home in the Sephardic scholarly curriculum. Three generations of the peripatetic Shem Tov family engaged with Maimonidean rationalism and Kabbalah, often coming to very different conclusions as to their proper place in Jewish tradition. Fault lines also appeared within the pro-­philosophy camp. While philosophers such as Joseph Albo, Abraham Shalom, and Abraham Bibago displayed an increased interest in articulating a set of dogmas on which Judaism was based, they disagreed about the role that systematic theology played in Judaism altogether. For some these principles represented the fundamental beliefs that every Jew must acknowledge, while for others, they were simply core notions of Judaism from which other principles were derived. Moreover, this entire exercise was rejected by Jewish kabbalists who asserted that all the elements of Torah were equally holy and could not be broken down into primary and secondary principles.41

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Such divides notwithstanding, it is striking that such scholarship continued to flourish at all amid the decline and disappearance of some of Spain’s leading yeshivot. The riots of 1391 had destroyed the great Jewish community of Barcelona, and with it one of the oldest and most important rabbinic centers in all of Europe. Toledo, Barcelona’s counterpart in Castile, continued to be a significant but much reduced site of Jewish study. For the most part centers for Jewish scholarship became smaller and more widely dispersed during the fifteenth century, following the general demographic trends of Spain’s Jewish population. Not all large Jewish communities had yeshivot, nor were all yeshivot located in large Jewish communities. The small, fortified Castilian town of Buitrago was the site of a major yeshiva where the great rabbinic scholar Isaac Aboab II held sway during the 1460s. Among the other notable yeshivot of the period were those of Salamanca, Segovia, Guadalajara, and Uclés in Castile, and Saragossa, Calatayud, and Tarragona in the Crown of Aragon. Few of these retained their prominence throughout this period. Indeed, leading Jewish scholars were even more peripatetic than they had been previously. They would write, copy, and translate works in a variety of locales, whether or not these communities possessed an established house of study. Fifteenth-­century yeshivot were important centers for copying books, as well as for study and instruction. There seems to have been a market for this literature, although at times scribes copied books for their own use. As communal governments struggled to reestablish themselves, wealthy patrons played an even larger role in supporting study houses and related intellectual activities. Their interest in preserving and promoting Jewish scholarship led to the proliferation of private midrashim—houses where books were copied, stored, and often made available to the public.42 A notable exception to the relative instability of Jewish intellectual centers was the city of Zamora. This midsize city near the border with Portugal boasted one of the most important yeshivot in all of Spain during this period. As older Jewish communities such as Burgos and Toledo declined, that of Zamora continued to grow, becoming one of the largest aljamas in Spain by the late fifteenth century.43 Here the local yeshiva developed under the leadership of Isaac Canpanton, author of a seminal work, Darkhei ha-­Talmud (The Ways of Talmud), in which he laid out a new systematic methodology for the study of Talmud based on logic and aimed at achieving a form of divine union by way of intellectual perfection. Canpanton’s innovative fusion of Talmudic and philosophical approaches and ideals became a (if not the) characteristic approach of Spanish Talmudists by mid-­century, and was later carried

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into exile by his disciples after 1492. This approach, which would come to be known as the Iyyun Sefardi (“Sephardic speculation”), informed the religious worldview of generations of scholars in the Sephardic diaspora.44 Indeed, the stature of Canpanton and the Zamora yeshiva was such that they raised up a whole series of Talmudists during the last decades of Jewish life in Spain. These included Isaac Aboab II, Isaac de Leon, Shem Tov ibn Shem Tov, Samuel Valensi, and Isaac Caro. Isaac Arama, author of the important homiletical work ‘Aqedat Yitzhak (The Binding of Isaac), was most likely a student of Canpanton and his eventual successor as head of the yeshiva in Zamora. Jacob ibn Habib and Abraham Saba were among the last generation of Zamora scholars and were instrumental in bringing the intellectual traditions of Castilian Jewry into the wider Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century. Perhaps the leading light of this last generation of Hispano-­Jewish scholars was Isaac Abravanel, a courtier-­rabbi and polymath in the mold of Ibn Naghrilla, Nahmanides, and Crescas. Although he spent much of his life in Portugal, Abravanel and his family had come there from Castile, and it was to Castile that he returned in 1483 when court intrigue in Lisbon forced him to flee for his life. He was a tax farmer and financial advisor to the crowned heads of both Portugal and Spain, in addition to being a remarkably productive scholar. He wrote deeply learned commentaries on the Bible, the Talmudic tractate ‘Avot, the Passover Haggadah, and Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, engaging questions of philosophy, history, and theology in innovative ways. Abravanel was also among the first Jewish authors to embrace the new humanist sensibilities of the age, thus opening a new chapter in the history of Jewish biblical exegesis. Such cross-­cultural influence can also be seen in some of the landmark examples of biblical illumination from the fifteenth century. Indeed, the art of Jewish manuscript illustration, which had reached a peak in the previous century, also continued during this later period, albeit on a more modest scale. The production of the so-­called Alba Bible, by the Castilian rabbi Moses Arragel, represents a particularly notable instance of interfaith cooperation. The bible was commissioned in 1422 by Luis de Guzmán, the grand master of the Order of Calatrava. Arragel worked on this illustrated Romance bible with two Christian scholars, the Franciscan Arias de Ençinas and the Dominican Johan de Zamora, and provided glosses to the text that drew on both Jewish and Christian traditions of biblical commentary. Also noteworthy is a bible known as the First Kennicott Bible, which was produced in La Coruña, Galicia, in 1476. This bible, copied by Moses ibn Zabara

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and illuminated by Joseph ibn Chaim, has unusually lavish decorations that combine Gothic and Islamic stylistic elements. Most other Jewish illuminated bibles from the period were produced in southern Castile from the 1460s to the 1480s and show a strong preference for Andalusi/Islamic motifs, including the use of micrographic design.45 The sermon continued to be an important mode of religious discourse for Jews, and a link between the world of the yeshiva and that of the synagogue and the wider community. A contract for a communal rabbi in Saragossa that dates from the mid-­fifteenth century details communal expectations for the post and affords some insights into Jewish religious life at this time. It notes that Rabbi Jucé, who was being appointed to the post, was to deliver twelve sermons a year in a synagogue of the aljama’s choosing, and on the Saturdays in which he was not giving a sermon he was required to teach the weekly Haftarah to adults. With regard to his preaching, he was required to speak about any religious matter brought to him by members of the aljama, as long as they gave him at least four days’ notice. During the rest of the week, he was to teach children—during the day in the summer months and during the evenings in winter. The contract specifies that he was to dedicate the first three days of the week (Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday) to the instruction in the Talmud. Since the rabbi had to oversee rituals of death, burial, and mourning, it was accepted that he would have less time for his other duties when a community member passed away. The community was thus asked to advise the rabbi of deaths in a timely manner, so that he could make the necessary accommodations. It also seems that the question of the permissibility of teaching philosophy as an interpretive tool for understanding Judaism was still very much a live issue during this period. It is interesting to note that, while philosophy continued to be an important subject for Jewish scholars as noted earlier, communal officials in places such as Saragossa did not seem to share their enthusiasm for the subject. The contract offered to Rabbi Jucé made a point of stipulating that he was not to take time away from religious studies to teach profane sciences, nor make any false pretense to avoid the former in order to teach the latter.46 Such prohibitions against philosophy were not in force in all communities. Solomon Seneor, brother of Abraham Seneor, preached in the main synagogue of Segovia on the subject of natural philosophy. In general Jewish preachers demonstrated both an awareness of Christian intellectual trends of the period as well as an appreciation for the relative respect and influence that Christian preachers enjoyed. Isaac Arama noted that many Jews were impressed by

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Christian preachers who searched “enthusiastically for religious and ethical content,” in contrast to Jewish preachers who, they complained, continued to expound on biblical grammar and the plain meaning of the commandments.47 Hyperbole notwithstanding, Jewish writers of this era were often quick to praise Christian preachers, and to point out the respect they received from their audiences. Nor was admiration for Christian religious culture limited to the Jewish elite. Over the course of the fifteenth century, Jews adopted melodies from Romance language songs, jettisoning those melodies that had been long popular for Hebrew songs. Even in their condemnation of this practice, Jewish writers noted the popularity of these tunes among Iberian Jews. Profayt Duran championed traditional Biblical cantillation over those melodies borrowed from non-­Jews, arguing that the latter only appealed to aesthetic values, while the former also appealed to the mind.48 Jewish writers continued to produce poetry, and while it may not have risen to the levels of quality and innovation achieved in earlier centuries, its champions still hailed it as a marker of Sephardic cultural superiority in much the same manner as Moses ibn Ezra had done some three centuries earlier. Among the most prolific of these poets was Solomon Bonafed, who formed part of a group known as the Saragossa circle. For these writers the continued production of strophic poetry modeled on that of their Andalusi predecessors was an opportunity to display a high level of technical skill while simultaneously linking themselves to a glorious intellectual past. For Bonafed, poetry was the highest expression of Judaism. His contemporary Profayt Duran railed against the focus on Talmud as a betrayal of the true Sephardic intellectual tradition.49 In Castile there was a similar late-­medieval revival of Sephardic cultural superiority partially influenced by parallel trends in the surrounding Christian society. Arguments for the political and cultural superiority of Spain, and of Castile in particular, became popular among Castilian Christian intellectuals during the fifteenth century. Hispano-­Jewish writing from this period displays an awareness of such rhetorical trends. Moreover, the conversos of Spain, and later Portugal, continued to be exposed to Christian theories of cultural preeminence as well as social and ethnic purity throughout the early modern period. The cultural outlook developed by leading converso intellectuals who returned to Judaism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries clearly reveals the influence of contemporary Christian debates over lineage and purity of blood, particularly among those Portuguese “nação” who settled in northern Europe. Thus, to the extent that we can identify a particularly “Sephardic” pride in lineage

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during the transition from the medieval to the early modern period, such an attitude appears to be tied as much to Christian attitudes of the age as to any longstanding Jewish traditions.50 Considering the diminished size of Jewish communities and the related financial instability of their communal institutions, the vitality of Jewish religious and intellectual life during the fifteenth century is quite remarkable. The flowering of Sephardic scholarship among the first and second generations of the Sephardic diaspora that developed throughout the Mediterranean during the sixteenth century is a testament to the resilience and piety of the last century of Jewish scholars in Spain who continued to produce important and influential works in the years between 1391 and 1492.

Living with the Conversos No social issue dominated this period for Christian rulers more than that of the conversos and the questions surrounding how, or if, they could be better integrated into Hispano-­Christian society. The lack of clarity regarding the new religious boundaries between Jews and Christians persisted into the second and third generation of the converso phenomenon, as many insisted that the children and grandchildren of those converted during the period between 1391 and 1415 were still fundamentally different from “Old” or “Natural” Christians. This ongoing rejection of these earlier conversions meant that a large sector of Spanish society whose members had known no other religion than Christianity was still marked as “New” Christians or simply as “Jews.” Andrés Bernáldez, a priest and royal chronicler of the late fifteenth century, would appear to represent the feelings of many Old Christians of the era when he asserted that all conversos were false Christians.51 The inability to fully accept and integrate the descendants of the early mass conversions shaped the trajectory of Spanish society throughout the fifteenth century and would haunt Spanish history for centuries afterward. Indeed, questions about the efficacy of baptism on Jews and Muslims eventually spread beyond Spain to shape the religious and political cultures of Portugal, Latin America, and much of Europe during the early modern period. For the Jews of Spain, too, it is hard to overestimate the impact of the converso phenomenon. In their edict of expulsion, Ferdinand and Isabella openly state that it was the active role that Jews had played in supporting

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Christian (read: converso) ties to Judaism that had prompted their decision to expel the Jews from their domains. Christians have engaged in and continue to engage in social interaction and communication they have had and continue to have with Jews, who, it seems, seek always and by whatever means and ways they can to subvert and steal faithful Christians from our holy Catholic faith and to separate them from it, and draw them to themselves and subvert them to their own wicked belief and conviction, instructing them in the ceremonies and observance of their law, holding meetings at which they read and teach that which people must hold and believe according to their law, achieving that the Christians and their children be circumcised and giving them books from which they may read their prayers and declaring to them the fasts that they must keep, and joining with them to read and teach them the history of their law, indicating to them the festivals before they occur, advising them of what in them they are to hold and observe, carrying to them and giving to them from their houses unleavened bread and meats ritually slaughtered, instructing them about the things from which they must refrain, as much in eating as in other things in order to observer their law, and persuading them as much as they can to hold and observe the law of Moses, convincing them that there is no other law or truth except for that one.52 While economic and political factors that went unstated in the edict of expulsion may well have contributed to the crown’s decision to exile its Jewish subjects, these accusations do seem to reflect widespread opinion regarding the pernicious effects of Jews on converso religious belief and practice. Converso intellectuals worked hard to defend their Christian identity against claims that they were nothing more than Jews in Christian clothing, deftly drawing on an array of Christian theological and legal arguments. But their treatises and letters could do little to turn the tide of public opinion. It was perhaps because the wealthy and well-­placed among the conversos had made such an easy transition that they drew the ire of so many other Christians, extending and intensifying the mistrust and complaints that earlier generations of Christians had lodged against Jewish courtiers. Moreover, since it was their perceived “Jewishness” that most made them objectionable to their

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detractors, the conversos became new targets for the longstanding popular scorn toward Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish customs. Nor were accusations of judaizing completely without merit. Many among the second and third generations of converso families were still thoroughly enmeshed in Jewish society, especially in those places where Jewish and New Christian relatives lived in close proximity to one another. Indeed, in those towns and cities where Jewish life had been more fully destroyed, such as Barcelona, Girona, and Burgos, evidence of actual judaizing was scarce. This reality served to promote the notion that it was proximity to practicing Jewish communities, and not popular Christian hatred and rejection of the New Christians, that represented the greatest obstacle to their full integration into Christian society. In many of the smaller communities that typified Jewish society in the fifteenth century, it was common for a handful of Jewish families to live among a few dozen families of conversos. In Daroca, Jews continued to eat and socialize with some conversos, while at the same time formally denouncing the converso community as apostates and traitors. Indeed, conversos in Aragon attempted to have Jewish testimonies to the Inquisition disqualified on the basis that Jews were known to denounce the New Christians in their synagogues.53 Nonetheless, instances of positive bonds between conversos and Jews did exist, as did examples of converso judaizing. Throughout the fifteenth century, conversos socialized and engaged with Jews in a variety of business dealings, as did those who boasted “Old Christian” status. But various eyewitness accounts attest to relationships of a more intimate nature between Jews and their former coreligionists, including their frequenting of Jewish sacred spaces and engaging in Jewish practices. Christians and Jews alike announced that they saw conversos standing at the back of local synagogues, barefoot and penitent, on the Jewish Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). There were instances of Jews providing kosher meat to conversos, teaching them Hebrew, and accepting donations from them for the synagogue or other Jewish charitable institutions. Some conversos continued to pay for benches in the local synagogue for those family members who remained Jewish and have them read out names of ailing converso relatives as part of the prayers for the sick and dying. Conversos were also known to buy meat from kosher butchers in large quantities and salt it for the winter, to eat unleavened bread (matza) at Passover, and to provide oil for synagogue lamps.54 While some of these accounts come from the dossiers of the Inquisition, and therefore raise important questions as to their accuracy, it is not hard to imagine that such

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testimonies hold at least some elements of truth. In small towns all aspects of life were public to a large degree, and it was impossible to hide such activities from one’s neighbors. Relatives remained part of each other’s lives despite belonging to two different religious communities. Conversos who were related to Jews continued to attend Jewish weddings and to exchange gifts during holidays and receive matza from them during Passover. Such practices may represent an effort to maintain Jewish religious observance but also illustrate the degree to which foodways, gift-­giving, and other forms of sociability were bound up with religious practices and could continue even if the religious intent was missing. Yet just as there were rivalries and tensions among competing factions within Jewish society, so too were there conflicts between Jews and conversos. Conversos generally kept to the same professions that they had had as Jews, often putting them into competition with members of their former communities. Famous examples of this can be found at the royal courts, where families like the Caballerías (in Aragon) and the Arias Dávila (in Castile) were prominent converso courtiers who remained deeply involved in the financial and political life of their respective kingdoms. Yet as a group, the conversos also emerged as economic competitors to Jews in more humble arenas. In Valencia, for instance, conversos took over much of the import and export trade. North African Jews, including many who were recent refugees from Spain, mostly dealt with conversos who, now that they were Christians, had more economic opportunities open to them. In Valencia and elsewhere, the fact that converso merchants worked on Saturdays gave them another competitive edge over their Jewish counterparts. In Segovia, a certain wealthy converso, Juan de Talavera, still sought to be the official scribe of the local Jewish community, even though he was no longer Jewish. He and his supporters challenged his Jewish rival, Abraham Seneor, for leadership of the Jews of Segovia just as if he were still a member of that community.55 For the most part, Christian society showed little interest in following the tensions and jealousies between professing Jews and conversos. As the conversos replaced Jews as tax-­collectors and financial advisors to the crown, frustration among Old Christians not only shifted toward them, but intensified. For their detractors Jews “masquerading” as Christians represented a far greater social and economic threat than Jews who accepted their place on the margins of Spanish society. By midcentury, converso courtiers and royal advisers outnumbered Jews throughout Spain. Perhaps more significantly conversos also began to occupy posts that were denied to Jews, such

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as significant episcopal seats, membership in religious orders, and offices in municipal government.56 Prominent conversos married into the Spanish aristocracy and became involved in the preexisting rivalries among the great baronial families. In Castile, in particular, the rise of the conversos into the upper echelons of the kingdom’s power structures provoked a strong backlash from other influential Christians. Denunciation of wealthy New Christians emphasized their Jewish ancestry as a source of dishonor and illegitimacy, a tactic that garnered popular support among the lower classes, and which also had negative repercussions on popular attitudes toward the Jews. In 1449 these longstanding grievances came to a head in the city of Toledo. In January of that year, a popular rebellion broke out against the crown in response to Álvaro de Luna’s decision to impose a forced loan of 1 million mrs. on the city of Toledo. Pedro Sarmiento, the king’s chief steward in charge of Toledo’s royal fortress, the Alcázar, soon assumed leadership of the rebels and took full control of the city. Sarmiento succeeded in galvanizing popular resentment of Alonso Cota, Toledo’s converso treasurer charged with collecting the levy, and Álvaro de Luna, who was seen as an ally of both Jews and conversos. Whatever political rivalries and socioeconomic jealousies that Sarmiento and the rebels may have harbored toward the conversos, they were careful to express their resentment mostly in religious terms. When the king threatened to besiege Toledo, the rebels sent him a petition in which they explained that their complaints against De Luna and the conversos were ultimately a defense of Christian values. The petition emphasized the “Jewish lineage” of the New Christians, arguing, without evidence, that most “have been found to be infidels and heretics, who have and continue to Judaize, and who have and continue to observe most of the rites and ceremonies of the Jews, apostatizing the chrism and the baptism they received, demonstrating with deeds and words that they received them with their flesh and not willingly or with their hearts so that they could pass as Christians.”57 Sarmiento represented a coalition of Old Christians who bitterly resented the power and position of those conversos who held important governmental posts and who fought back by characterizing all conversos as Jews. He arrested leading conversos and subjected them to torture to illicit confessions of judaizing. He then called for the accused to be burned at the stake, and for months wealthy converso merchants were attacked, robbed, killed, or driven from the city. Sarmiento demanded that Juan II oust all converso ministers from his court, threatening to back the royal infante, Enrique, against the king. When Juan II failed to comply with these demands, Sarmiento took

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matters into his own hands, issuing his famous ordinance known as the Sentencia-­Estatuto, in which he proclaimed that: “all conversos descended from the perverse lineage of the Jews . . . should be incapable and unworthy to hold any office or benefice, whether public or private, in the city of Toledo or its environs.”58 The Toledan statutes of 1449 were the first major articulation of what came to be known as the theory of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), which argued that Jewish ancestry was so inherently pernicious that it could never truly be overcome. The Toledo rebellion lasted for two years before it was finally put down by the crown, but the anti-­Jewish and anti-­converso fervor that had fueled it continued to grow. As noted in the previous chapter, Christian (and Jewish) unwillingness to see the conversos as fully Christian had been a problem since the mass conversions of the late fourteenth century. By the 1430s most conversos were of the second generation, children of converso parents, and had no direct recollection of life as part of a Jewish community. Whatever crypto-­ Jewish tendencies they may have learned from their parents, they were legally part of Christian, not Jewish, society, and bristled at the various obstacles they still encountered due to their family lineage. A letter to Pope Eugene IV on behalf of the beleaguered conversos of Aragon reflects the sorts of difficulties they encountered at this time, noting: “Other Christians do not wish to admit them to public office or to councils and government bodies. They do not even want to contract marriages nor join families with them, and the conversos are so vilified that it is worse than if they were still Jews.”59 Theologically, the idea that Jewishness was somehow stronger than the sacrament of baptism was extremely problematic. Pope Nicholas V condemned the statutes of 1449, following the objections of Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, a converso theologian who argued passionately for the fair treatment and inclusion of the New Christians. But popular animosities and social tensions had a way of blunting church doctrine, and many “Old” Christians remained convinced that anyone with any Jewish ancestry would always be somehow Jewish. The Toledan municipal statutes aimed at excluding conversos from public office on the basis of their Jewish bloodlines marked a turning point in Christian-­Jewish relations. The notion that the Jews were poisoning Christian society through their contacts with the conversos was becoming widespread in Spain, fueled by traditional religious hostility toward Judaism as well as by the social and political fissures of the moment. By 1461 a leading Franciscan theologian named Alonso de Espina had finished his great anti-­ Jewish treatise, Fortalitium Fidei (Fortress of the Faith), in which he targeted

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the Jews as representing the gravest challenges to the contemporary church. Espina was a charismatic preacher and influential advisor to the courts of both Juan II and Enrique IV. Although he fell out of favor at court in the years preceding his death in 1466, his Fortalitium Fidei remained an influential work long afterward. In it, he championed the notion that all conversos were, in fact, Jews, and provided examples of what he argued was proof of their continued fidelity to Judaism. Much like Sarmiento, he also moved past such standard condemnations to propose clear and decisive action to resolve this “crisis” within Spanish society. To combat what he perceived to be a plague of judaizing, Espina called for the extension of the Inquisition into Castile where, unlike the Crown of Aragon, no formal tribunal existed at the time. He also advocated for the separation of Old and New Christians, especially in their residences and neighborhoods, and called for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, firmly linking them to the problem of converso heresy and providing something of a road map for a new, expanded office of the Inquisition. Inspired by preachers like Espina and by the example set by Sarmiento, other city councils, as well as military and religious orders and institutions of higher learning, began to impose legal restriction on the conversos. Such legal measures were a clear example of the increasing rejection of the conversos by Spanish society. Violence was another. Anti-­converso riots broke out once again in Toledo in 1467, and in Córdoba, Seville, and Carmona between 1473 and 1474.60 While actual professing Jews were not the targets of most of this hostility, their inclusion in the accusations of converso heresy augured ill for them. Indeed, it was during the late 1460s that a group of Jews in Sepúlveda were accused of ritual murder, eventually leading to their execution. It was one of the earliest and most notorious blood libels against the Jews in Castile and marked the deterioration of Jewish status and security.61 In addition to such attacks, Jews also suffered from the general violence and political instability of the period. In 1462 a ten-­year long civil war began in Catalonia pitting Catalan nobles against King Juan II. Once again the Jews were caught in the antimonarchist rebellion and targeted, along with “Jewish” New Christians, as symbols of royal oppression. Rebel troops attacked the Jewish quarter in Cervera and threatened the one in Tàrrega.62 Jews in Castile also found themselves occasionally collateral damage in armed conflicts between Christian factions. In 1474 Portuguese forces invaded Castile, capturing Zamora, Toro, and the surrounding area. The Jews there suffered from being caught in a war zone. It was this war-­torn and politically fractured landscape

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that greeted Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon as they came to power in the 1470s. Their marriage and long, eventful reign as comonarchs of a united Spain would help to bring about renewed political stability, a significant centralization of power, and unimaginable territorial expansion. For their Jewish subjects, however, this newfound stability would come at an unprecedented cost.

The Jews Under Ferdinand and Isabella: From Segregation to Expulsion Enrique IV of Castile (r. 1454–74) was another in a long line of relatively weak kings, and his reign was dominated by challenges from the nobility and marked by civil war. His younger brother and chosen successor, Alfonso, died at the age of fourteen in 1468. When King Enrique died six years later, the nobles backed his surviving sibling, his half-­sister Isabella, as queen of Castile. Isabella was a young woman of twenty-­three when she assumed the throne in December 1474, and there was little to indicate that she would alter the recent tradition of weak and ineffective Castilian monarchs. She had been married for two years to Ferdinand of Aragon, her second cousin and heir to the Aragonese throne. When Ferdinand became king of Aragon in 1479, the couple effectively united the crowns of Aragon and Castile for the first time. The royal couple inherited a society at odds over a number of issues, not the least of which was the rapidly deepening divide between Old and New Christians, and the negative role that the Jews were popularly perceived to play in undermining the conversos’ dedication to the Christian faith. In 1476, just two years after she took hold of the throne, the question of Jewish status was once again raised at the Cortes held in Isabella’s hometown of Madrigal. The resulting legislation marked a shift toward the enforcement of restrictive policies concerning the Jews. The queen lent her support to the usual measures that came out of such meetings. Namely, the Jews were required to settle debts with Christian debtors and to depend on the Christians for assurance that the Jews had not acted fraudulently. The Jews were once again commanded to wear the badge, and to otherwise restrict themselves in the colors and fabrics of their clothing. As always, the wealthy and well-­connected were able to obtain royal exemptions to these laws, while other Jews were not. Thus the basic contents of the 1476 anti-­Jewish decrees were not particularly new. But Madrigal was just the beginning. Whereas

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earlier efforts to enforce Jewish separation from the surrounding Christian populace and to restrict their social and economic mobility had lost steam after a few years, the ascension of Isabella and then Ferdinand brought a heretofore unknown dedication to the implementation of such legislation. This effective enforcement of royal policies soon became a hallmark of their reign. After joining the peninsula’s two largest and most powerful realms, the royal couple set out to pacify their territories after years of unrest and political intrigue. They succeeded in subduing rebellious nobles, repelling an invasion from Portugal, and forcing independent military orders such as the Knights of Santiago to submit to their authority. The question of converso judaizing became part of this royal program of sociopolitical reform. Touring their new domain to appraise the political situation and to assert their authority, the king and queen convened a church synod in Seville in 1478. There they heard from Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, the archbishop of Seville, and Fray Alonso de Hojeda, the Dominican prior of a local convent, who complained bitterly to them of rampant judaizing among the conversos of the region. Their claims that the Jews of Andalusia were guilty of aiding and abetting this heretical behavior were not new. But for the first time in more than fifty years, these accusations were reaching royal authorities with both the power and the inclination to act. The speed and force of the crown’s response to these allegations suggest that, aware of the problem, they had already considered a course of action. The monarchs wrote to Pope Sixtus, asking the papacy to grant them the right to establish a new branch of the Inquisition in Seville, under the independent direction of the crown, to investigate the matter of heresy in Andalusia— and in the rest of their domains. The request was unprecedented. The fact that the crown, rather than the papacy and the Spanish bishops, would appoint and guide the inquisitors marked an important departure from previous policy. The establishment of a Castilian office of the Inquisition under royal control must be understood as part of a larger strategy aimed at disentangling the Jewish and converso communities and thereby addressing widespread and persistent accusations of judaizing. While the inquisitors would be charged with rooting out heresy among the conversos, the king and queen rededicated themselves to the policies aimed at segregating the Jews and limiting their contact with, and thus their influence on, Christians, both old and new. In December 1477 the crown ordered the Jewish quarter of Soria to be relocated, so as to better separate the Jews from their Christian neighbors. A similar decree was made

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with regard to the Jews of Cáceres the following year.63 The oft-­reiterated yet rarely implemented call for segregation (apartamiento) of the Jewish and Christian communities was raised again at the Cortes that met at Toledo in 1480. Unlike in the case of the Cortes of Madrigal four years earlier, royal support for these measures was more than just perfunctory. This time the king and queen lent their now characteristic vigor to the legislation. After 1480 Jews throughout Castile were enclosed in fixed Jewish quarters. Responsibility for enforcing the separation fell to the municipalities, but the crown created a new group of officials known as visitadores who were charged with overseeing these population transfers. In May 1484, Pope Sixtus IV lent his support to the process, issuing a bull that forbade Jews and Muslims to live among Christians.64 Jews living outside their town’s Jewish quarter were now to be relocated within its carefully controlled boundaries, and new quarters were constructed in those towns where none had previously existed. Throughout Spain, Jewish quarters were walled in, and gates connecting these neighborhoods to the rest of the city were closed up, save one. The task of building new houses and segregating all Jewish residences was daunting, and it generally took two years to complete these transfers within a given city. The forced sales of homes and other properties put the Jews at a disadvantage, and the collective economic impact was immense. The financial burden for the purchase or construction of new houses and synagogues fell on the Jews themselves and was exacerbated by a sharp rise in rents in these Jewish quarters, since the property owners knew the Jews had no other options. These transfers also required the relocation or creation of new workshops and stores; and the financial burden on many Jews was severe. The Jews’ general living conditions also deteriorated, as the visitadores who were charged with selecting the locations of the new Jewish quarters invariably chose the least desirable areas. These were usually on the edge of towns, often amid the tanneries and slaughterhouses, whereas Jews had traditionally been settled in the town centers close by the cathedral, castle, or royal marketplace. Overcrowding quickly became a problem in several of these new juderías, and although Jewish appeals to the crown prompted royal demands that local city councils find ways to ameliorate the situation, the concejos showed little interest in aiding the Jews. Furthermore, the cost of these transfers strained the resources of several aljamas. In some areas the new dwellings were little more than shacks on the outskirts of town. Several of these new quarters were too small, or communal funds too scant, to

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reconstruct public buildings such as synagogues and hospices. In Ourense, Galicia, the communal synagogue was in such a dilapidated state that it was destroyed soon after the Jews left, and a new building was constructed on the spot.65 Local enthusiasm for the implementation of restrictive measures on the Jews went beyond the royal program for separate living quarters. Municipal councils that had long sought to promote their own economic interests over those of the local aljama took this opportunity to enact legislation that further reduced the Jews’ social and economic standing. In Segovia, Burgos, and Medina del Campo, the concejos limited the Jews’ access to the local marketplace—and enacted other ordinances meant to stop the flow of food and other necessities to the aljamas. The crown saw such measures as an encroachment on royal jurisdiction over their Jewish subjects but could do little to halt this process, which now had a momentum all its own.66 For more than a decade before the expulsion, the lives of Jews in nearly every corner of the peninsula had already begun to unravel. The sixty years between the Disputation of Tortosa and the rise of the Catholic monarchs was something of a reprieve for Jewish communities, as Christian animosity was more regularly directed at the conversos. But the ongoing ties between conversos and Jews, and the popular assessment of this relationship as one that promoted heresy within Christian society, eventually returned the Jews to a major focal point of Christian wrath. In November 1478, Pope Sixtus IV granted the Spanish monarchs the right, in perpetuity, to appoint two to three inquisitors with the power to investigate “heretical depravity,” clearing the way for the establishment of what would become known as the Spanish Inquisition.67 For more than a year, the king and queen held onto the papal bull without putting it into effect, as a handful of ecclesiastics undertook a campaign of preaching against converso heresy. But these initial efforts to resolve the issue met with little success, and so, on September 27, 1480, they invested two Dominican friars, Miguel de Morillo and Juan de Martín, with the powers of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. And as with so many royal programs initiated by Ferdinand and Isabella, their expansion of the Inquisition showed a commitment and determination unmatched by their immediate predecessors. Over the next twenty years, inquisitorial tribunals were established throughout Castile—at Seville, Córdoba, Jaén, and Granada in the south, northward to Toledo, Cuenca, Ciudad Real, Valladolid, and Sigüenza, and from Llerena in Extremadura to Murcia on the Mediterranean coast. The foundation of the new, royally

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directed Inquisition took longer in the Crown of Aragon, but by the late 1480s there were tribunals operating in Saragossa, Valencia, Barcelona, and La Palma, Mallorca. The development of the Holy Office in Spain took another major step forward in 1483 when Pope Sixtus IV agreed to appoint Tomás de Torquemada, prior of the Convent of Santa Cruz in Segovia and a longtime spiritual guide to Queen Isabella, to be the first inquisitor general for Castile and Aragon. With the installment of Torquemada as inquisitor general, the crown signaled its intention to extend the authority of the Castilian Inquisition to the Crown of Aragon. This expansion of the royal Inquisition encountered strong resistance at first. Aragonese conversos and Old Christians alike complained that this step was unnecessary, since the papal Inquisition was still in operation in the region and many feared that the new Holy Office would be used to erode local privileges and customs. The Jews there also had cause for concern. As early as the 1390s, the papal Inquisition operating in the Crown of Aragon had begun to arrest Jews for crimes associated with “judaizing.” This term, with its general sense of inducing conversos to engage in aspects of Jewish religious and cultural practices, was often a pretext to confiscate the wealth and property of professing Jews. If such accusations failed, the inquisitors could also claim that wealthy Jews had in fact been baptized and were thus false converts themselves. Neither tactic required a great deal of evidence to be effective, and many Jews chose to “purchase” official writs of absolution as a means of gaining their freedom and avoiding trial. These methods characterized inquisitorial activity for decades, leading both Jews and Christians to see the inquisitors as little more than greedy opportunists. Yet, suspicion of the inquisitors’ motives did not necessarily coincide with sympathy for their victims. Inquisitorial and other ecclesiastical claims of widespread judaizing between Jews and New Christians, whether true or false, succeeded in blurring the lines between the two and fostering popular resentment for both communities. While Old Christians among the urban oligarchs of towns like Saragossa and Teruel resented the New Christian elites, they found common cause with them in their distrust of the Castilian inquisitors as outsiders. The town fathers and lawyers of Saragossa and Teruel mounted campaigns to stymie inquisitorial powers of the new inquisitors, but Ferdinand would not be denied. At Teruel he assigned royal officials to govern the city, investing them with broad powers to support the work of the inquisitors. Several of the wealthiest and most influential New Christians were condemned, and some

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of these fled and were burned in effigy. Others, like Jaime Martínez Santángel, were burned at the stake along with eight other men and women in a public auto-­da-­fé on January 7, 1486.68 In Saragossa resistance to the Inquisition was even greater, and with dire consequences. In the spring of 1485, a group of converso merchants, lawyers, and clerics, together with some Old Christian supporters, plotted to break the hold of the Inquisition in Aragon by assassinating the appointed inquisitor, Pedro Arbués. The inquisitor got wind of the plot and took some precautions, including wearing chain mail under his robes, but to no avail. On the night of September 15, 1485, Arbués was stabbed to death while kneeling before the main altar in the Cathedral of Saragossa. But instead of breaking the hold of the Inquisition in Aragon, the conspirators managed to stiffen its resolve and provide it with a symbol of the very danger the Holy Office claimed was widespread in the kingdom. The response of the crown and the Inquisition was swift and decisive. A series of executions and public autos were held in Saragossa in the years following the murder of Arbués. Conspirators who fled to Tudela were tracked down. Others who evaded capture were burned in effigy. Less violent attempts to resist the powers of the Inquisition in Valencia and Catalonia also failed. Those who sought to resist the expansion of the Holy Office found in King Ferdinand a sovereign with greater resolve than any they had known for generations. Emboldened by this royal support, the inquisitors did not take long to turn their attention to the Jews. They petitioned the crown to aid them in their efforts to stop the Jews’ alleged contamination of the New Christians, and by the end of 1482, the first expulsions of the Jews had begun with those living in Jerez de la Frontera. The following year, Jews were expelled from the rest of Andalusia—including from the dioceses of Cádiz, Córdoba, and Seville—and then from Saragossa, Albarracín, and Teruel, in 1486. At the same time, Christian forces began to advance against the Muslim Kingdom of Granada, capturing towns with small Jewish populations. It quickly became clear that the royal policy that had cleared the Jews from Andalusia was now to be extended to these new territories. At Ronda, Jews were forbidden to return to the town, and at Málaga the Jewish community was captured and held at a prison camp near Carmona for nearly two years while emissaries were sent out to attempt to meet the exorbitant ransom demanded for their release. The city of Granada was home to some 110 Jewish households at the time of its conquest in January 1492, many of whom appear to have been recent refugees from Castile, including some former conversos. While the

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Muslim population was permitted to remain in the city and adhere to their religious law and customs, the Jews were given one month to leave.69 In several cities this renewed royal push to separate the Jews from the conversos met with enthusiastic approval. A new wave of anti-­Jewish sentiment took hold, much as it had in 1391, and quickly spread beyond royal control. The Castilian municipality of Valmaseda decided to expel its Jews in January 1486. The crown annulled the decree, as it was taken independently and not as part of a royal program of action, but such independent local decisions illustrate how widespread the popular animosity toward the Jews had become. Indeed, the town of Valmaseda ignored the crown’s policy and forcibly expelled its Jews anyway. At Teruel and Saragossa, too, the Jews were expelled first, and royal approval of the measures followed after the fact. More traditional critics of the Jews’ status also continued to harass them at this time. In Segovia a Dominican friar named Antonio de la Peña fulminated against the Jews and called for their expulsion during the 1480s. Conversionary pressure and its attendant violence also began to appear in Zamora, which was quickly becoming a refuge for Jews from other parts of Castile. Jews there were subjected to the inflammatory sermons of Fray Juan de Santo Domingo, who harangued them, urging them to convert and to contribute financially to the “crusade” against Muslim Granada. When he failed to realize these goals, he sought to curtail Jewish movement in the city and to enforce their complete separation from Christians. As conditions in Zamora worsened, Jews were falsely imprisoned and attacked with impunity. Some were even stoned to death. Complaining to the crown, the remaining Jewish population eventually received a writ of royal protection for themselves and their goods. Nevertheless, the tensions caused by Fray Juan and his followers illustrate the deterioration of the Jews’ status during their last years in Spain.70 The association of Jews with converso heresy grew throughout the latter half of the fifteenth century and found its most infamous expression in the hysteria around the “Holy Child of La Guardia.” The incident began when a group of Christians declared that they had discovered a eucharist host in the baggage of a converso artisan. The accused was duly arrested and tortured, leading to the further arrest of eleven Jews and conversos, who were charged with stealing hosts from a church in La Guardia, near Toledo, as well as with kidnapping and crucifying a boy from the town. No trace of the boy, or any other evidence, was ever found, and the testimonies of the “witnesses” diverged wildly. One of those accused, a Jew named Yuçe Franco, maintained his innocence, even under torture, and objected that he could not be guilty

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of heresy since he was not a Christian. Such protests fell on deaf ears, and after months of torture all eleven were found guilty and burned at the stake in Ávila in November 1491. The Inquisition seized on the case as evidence of Jewish-­converso conspiracies of the worst sort, and translated the trial account into Catalan in order to disseminate the case more broadly. In many ways the case of the Holy Child of La Guardia represents a culmination of anti-­Jewish and anti-­converso sentiment permeating much of Spain in the late fifteenth century. It also illustrates the ways in which the Jews remained inextricably linked to converso heresy in the popular Christian imagination. Far from allaying suspicions of judaizing, royal and local programs aimed at segregating Jews and limiting their contract with Christians only served to confirm fears of Jewish treachery. Faced with mounting animosity toward the Jews, the crown came to embrace the notion that successful integration of the conversos into Spanish society necessitated the expulsion of their Jewish subjects. For the Jews this momentous decision carried with it a measure of irony. For centuries the crowned heads of the various Spanish kingdoms had protected and promoted Jewish rights, albeit primarily in the service of their own political and economic agendas. The resentment that such royal policies had produced among other sectors of Spanish society, combined with various forms of religious antagonism and demonization of the Jews, had created an enduring tension between them and their Christian neighbors. Popular hostility was usually offset by royal power. As I have noted, Spanish Jewry tended to benefit from strong monarchs and to suffer during times of weak royal authority or political chaos. The rise to power of the Catholic monarchs during the 1470s thus represents something of an anomaly in this regard. Their reign marked one of the most successful expansions of royal authority in the history of medieval Spain, but this time the centralization of power would come at the expense, rather than in favor, of Jewish rights. On January 2, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella accepted the formal surrender of Muhammed XII, the last Muslim ruler of Granada, at the city’s Alhambra palace. And it was at the Alhambra, some three months later, that they drew up a royal charter expelling all professing Jews from their kingdoms and lordships. The edict of expulsion was not issued for another month, giving the Jews under three months to prepare for life in exile, or to accept conversion and remain in a society that had already become virulently hostile to converts. High-­ranking conversos and Jews, including the great Jewish courtier Abraham Seneor, attempted to intervene with the crown and cancel or delay

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the decree. Their efforts proved unsuccessful. On June 15, 1492, Seneor converted along with his son-­in-­law Meir Melamed (and most of their family) in the town of Guadalupe, adopting the names Fernán Núñez de Coronel and Fernán Pérez de Coronel, respectively. Seneor’s decision to accept baptism rather than exile may be seen as symbolic of a lack of religious fortitude among the Jewish courtier elite, but the conversion of local communal leaders was felt far more keenly by average Jews. For most, the period between the promulgation of the expulsion decree on May 1 and the last day they were given to leave, July 31, was marked by chaos, uncertainty, and fear. Many were still reeling from the recent forced relocation of their homes and businesses to the newly demarcated juderías, and had little in the way of the funds and strength required to reestablish their lives in foreign lands. Most Jews were pious and valued their religious and cultural heritage, but they also had to be pragmatic. Entering exile without any means of supporting themselves was untenable. Jews unsure of what to do often found themselves influenced by family members and communal leaders who decided to accept baptism rather than exile, a phenomenon that evokes images of conversions that had followed the riots of 1391. These last tumultuous months were also a microcosm of the sorts of communal problems and divisions that had long defined Jewish communal life in Spain and elsewhere in the medieval world. As the crown demanded taxes from the aljamas before they disintegrated, the latter lashed out, rather impotently, at those Jews who would not meet their fiscal responsibilities. In Ejea de los Caballeros, the communal council threatened to excommunicate Jews who did not pay. But at a time when many were weighing the option to convert and stay, such threats would have been fairly hollow. Indeed, those who were poor, indebted, or socially marginalized often had little recourse but to accept baptism. Many Christians took advantage of the impending expulsion to abuse Jewish rights. Debts to Jewish lenders went unpaid, goods were stolen, and pawned items were wrongfully reclaimed with impunity. This was true of the royal officials in charge of Jewish affairs as much as average individuals. Christians who worked as tenant farmers on Jewish lands sought to purchase their plots cheaply once news of the impending expulsion spread. Some took ownership of the land without making payments at all. Jews also suffered a variety of abuses on their way into Portugal, at the ports, and aboard the ships bound for Italy and North Africa. For many of the exiles, the hardships they were forced to endure during their last months in Spain were only the beginning. Unlike the earlier flight

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of Andalusi Jews into Christian Iberia, there were few places that welcomed the refugees of 1492. The nearby kingdoms of Portugal and Navarre provided safe haven at first. But in 1497 Manuel I of Portugal converted the Jews of his kingdom, natives and newcomers alike, by royal decree. The following year, under pressure from Ferdinand and Isabella, Johan III and Catalina of Navarre issued their own edict, demanding that the Jews leave or convert. With overland passage denied them by the rulers of Spain and France, Navarrese Jews and the recent arrivals from Spain had no choice but to accept baptism. By 1498 the long history of Jewish life in Iberia had come to an end.71

* * * In general, the Jews’ experience in their last century in Spain can be divided into three periods. The first, extending from the riots of the late fourteenth century, ended sometime between 1415 and 1420 and created a social and political crisis from which the surviving Jews would struggle to recover. The second period, from around 1415 to the 1470s, was one in which Jewish communal leaders attempted to reorganize their aljamas even as many Jews fled to the relative safety of small, dispersed settlements. Kings Alfonso  V and Juan II in Aragon and Don Álvaro de Luna in Castile returned to a policy of protecting Jewish rights, and there was a shift away from the sorts of fiscal demands on Jewish aljamas that had wreaked such havoc during the fourteenth century. Yet despite their efforts and those of Jewish leaders like Abraham Bienveniste, Jewish political life never fully recovered from the destabilizing effects of the earlier riots and mass conversions. Throughout this long middle period, many Jewish communities were plagued by cycles of political corruption, factionalism, and popular dissent, causing them to remain dependent on the intervention of Christian authorities. Indeed, the repositioning of so much of Jewish society from larger centers to small towns and villages may well have suited many Jewish artisans, small-­scale merchants, and peddlers, who saw the elite families who dominated communal life as self-­serving if not predatory. With regard to interfaith relations, much of the anti-­Jewish animus of previous decades was now focused on the conversos, who were seen as posing a more immediate threat to the power and status of Old Christian society. Nonetheless, it was the converso phenomenon, and the inability of Spanish society effectively to assimilate the first three generations of these converts, that ultimately determined the fate of Jewish life in the peninsula.

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The third and final period runs from the 1470s to 1492. It coincides with the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, and marks a clear turning point for the Jews of Spain. While the crown still protected their Jewish subjects and renewed Jewish privileges, popular animosity toward the Jews regarding their perceived association with converso heresy demanded attention. Their decision to establish a new, royally controlled office of the Inquisition at the urging of leading ecclesiastics such as González de Mendoza, Alonso de Hojeda, and Tomás de Torquemada, actualized the vision laid out by Alonso de Espina in the 1460s. But as momentous a decision as this was, Ferdinand and Isabella’s impact on the Jews’ status was less defined by innovative programs than by their will and ability to enforce older policies aimed at segregation and control. Popular Christian insistence that Jews were universally to blame for the judaizing tendencies of conversos was a key factor in the crown’s decision to issue the edict of expulsion. While such accusations developed out of sociopolitical motivations and played on popular religious fears, they nonetheless reflected a certain measure of social reality. Jews did maintain a variety of links to these former Jews and their offspring, in small towns as well as in elite political circles. Yet this characterization of the Jewish community ignores much of its rich and complex history during the fifteenth century. It overlooks the rivalries and competition that existed between Jews and conversos, as well among the Jews themselves. It also misses the intense religious devotion that still defined so much of the Jews’ daily life. Throughout their final decades in Spain, Jewish religious and intellectual culture continued to thrive, even as their scholarly centers became more modest and more transient than in previous generations. The study of Talmud, Kabbalah, and philosophy continued, as did debates about the relative benefits and dangers posed by each. Leading Jewish scholars drew inspiration from the older poetic and artistic models of al-­Andalus as well as from contemporary Christian scholasticism and new forms of humanism. To the very end, the Jews of Spain defied easy characterizations. They fought with as well as for one another. Many clung proudly to their religion, while others converted, often blurring religious boundaries in the process. They championed their unique cultural heritage even as they borrowed from the surrounding culture, and found ways to flourish even in an era of collective decline.

Epilogue

The expulsion of the Jews from Spain had a range of consequences, many of them unforeseen. It is possible that Fernando and Isabella had hoped that most Jews would choose conversion over exile. Soon after the expulsion, those Jews who had left were encouraged to return and accept baptism. As early as November 10, 1492, the crown issued a safe-­conduct to those Jews who had left Castile but now wished to return. The crown guaranteed the safety of all returnees and promised them that they would be able to buy back their properties for the amount for which they had sold them. The grace period for those Jews willing to return and convert was extended until 1499.1 For the Jews financial considerations played a major role in the decision to stay in Spain or to abandon life in exile and return. Some who had accepted expulsion left behind spouses and other family members who sought to settle debts and lodge suits to recover property so as not to lose their fortunes entirely. When such plans proved too slow or difficult to be realized, some exiles accepted conversion in order to return and pursue their claims. The Catholic monarchs generally supported such petitions, admonishing their officials who had wrongfully taken advantage of these Jews and ordering that their goods and homes be restored to them now that they had converted. King Ferdinand noted: “How blessed a thing it is to favor and aid those who come to a recognition of the holy faith of Jesus Christ and persevere in it!”2 The amounts of these claims could be quite large—40,000 mrs. in the case of one conversa widow, and 306,500 mrs. in the case of a Jew from San Esteban de la Sierra who was forced to leave before he was able to collect this substantial amount. Others were robbed at the border and refused to cross without their goods. They stayed in Spain, converting in order to do so, and pursued their cases in court.3 Many of these returnees succeeded in recovering their property and reestablishing themselves in Spanish society. Jacob Agay, a Jewish vecino of

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Torremormojón in northern Castile, left for Portugal in 1492 but returned after a year, converted, and once again took up residence in his native town as Alvar Gómez del Castillo. It seems that he was able to regain his social position; now that he was a Christian, his position might have even been better than before. His former Christian associates welcomed him back, supporting him in various business transactions and court cases. While some of these Christians might have been conversos, and thus former friends, neighbors, and possibly even relatives, they may equally have been Old Christians. Indeed, there is no indication that Gómez del Castillo’s religious background was a serious impediment to his success within Torremormojón society. Within a decade of his return, he appears to have established himself firmly among the elite of the town.4 Even those Jews who remained in exile maintained close ties to the culture and people of their homeland, especially to those conversos who continued to live there. Indeed, the destinies of Sephardic Jews and conversos would remain entangled for centuries. Perhaps the greatest reason for this were the events that took place in Portugal in the years following the expulsion from Spain. The Kingdom of Portugal was the primary destination for Jewish refugees in 1492. Few had the means to go farther, and many, it seemed, hoped that conditions would change so that they would be allowed to return to their homes in Spain. But as the refugees poured into Portugal, Ferdinand and Isabella began to pressure the Portuguese crown to expel the Jews, a measure that received the support of many Portuguese Christians. By 1496 Portugal’s new king, Manuel I, acceded to these demands. He issued a decree expelling all the Jews of his kingdom, along with his Muslim subjects and a group of Castilian conversos who had come to Portugal to escape harassment by the Spanish Inquisition. The exiled were given a year to depart, but at the last minute, the king changed his mind and decided to keep his Jewish subjects, both new and old, by declaring that they all be required to accept Christianity. The forced conversions of all Portuguese Jewry in 1497 were part of a tragic cycle of events that echoed those that had taken place in Spain after 1391. Even before 1492, the presence of Castilian conversos in Portugal had prompted violence against them, as well as accusations that Portuguese Jews were aiding these conversos to return to Judaism. Following the death of King João II in October 1495, Jews in several cities came under attack, and Jewish-­Christian relations remained tense as Manuel I began his reign. Manuel’s decision to convert the entire Jewish population by royal decree only served to reinforce the notion that all converts were false, sowing widespread

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mistrust, resentment, and hatred of these New Christians. In 1506 a riot broke out in Lisbon as a mob of Portuguese Old Christians and foreign sailors attacked local conversos for heresy. The result was a massacre of Lisbon’s converso community and widescale destruction of property. Seeking to curtail such popular uprisings and aid in the integration of the New Christian population, the Portuguese crown petitioned the pope to establish a separate branch of the Inquisition in the kingdom. The request was eventually granted, and in May 1536, the General Council of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Portugal was formally established. However, as had been the case in Spain, the Portuguese Inquisition was more of an obstacle to the integration of New Christians into Portuguese society than it was an aid. Its activities further strengthened the association of the conversos with Judaism in the minds of many Portuguese, and its dogged prosecution of suspected heretics led many conversos to flee the country. Some of those who had come from Spain now returned there, preferring to live as Christians in their ancestral homes among their relatives. Others, including Portuguese Jews without any ties to Spain, sought to reach lands where they might return openly to Judaism. In the early sixteenth century, this led many conversos to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, following in the footsteps of those Spanish Jews who had fled to Mediterranean lands in 1492. By the seventeenth century, former conversos had also begun to settle in the burgeoning Protestant cities of northern Europe, such as Amsterdam and London. There, they could reembrace Judaism even as they kept their distance from other Jewish communities. This branch of the Sephardic diaspora came to be known as the nação, or “nation,” a reference to their Portuguese and converso background that distinguished them from those Sephardim who had not passed through Portugal. In Portugal the forced conversion of 1497 and the subsequent hostility of Portuguese Old Christians fostered a determination among many conversos to cling to Judaism while living outwardly as Christians. This new current of crypto-­Judaism was often nurtured by conversa women, who laid the foundation for a vibrant folk culture among those conversos who left Iberia and returned to Judaism over the course of the early modern period. In most of the communities where they came to settle, the Spanish and Portuguese conversos or Marranos, as they are sometimes called, were generally considered to be fellow Sephardim. Those Jews who left Spain in 1492 and remained in exile carried with them many of the cultural features that had characterized Jewish society in Spain

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for centuries. These included a dedication to the profession of medicine and to artisan crafts, such as cloth-­and metalworking, as well as the financial and diplomatic skills that continued to make a small cadre of Jewish elites valued courtiers to both Christian and Muslim lords. They established new congregational communities whose names recalled their ancestral homes in medieval Spain and Portugal, and many continued to speak a form of medieval Judeo-­Spanish, developing it into a language known alternately as Judezmo, Djudyo, Spaniol, and Ladino. Sephardic scholars remained dedicated to the study and exposition of sacred texts and to the traditions of legal codification, philosophy, and mysticism that had been developed in medieval Spain. Indeed, the expulsion and dispersion of Sephardic scholars in 1492 was a major factor in the dissemination of kabbalistic thought, and in the eventual harmonization of formerly distinct strands of mystical knowledge. Many of these kabbalists and their students found a home in Safed, a small town in Ottoman Galilee, and turned it into perhaps the greatest center of mystical learning in Jewish history. For example, Moses Cordovero, a Sephardic rabbi living in Safed, combined older, disparate mystical trends in his encyclopedic work Pardes Rimonim (Orchard of Pomegranates). Cordovero’s systemization of Jewish mystical thought helped to lay the groundwork for the widespread adoption of kabbalistic ideals within normative Judaism. In sixteenth-­century Spain a similar renaissance in Christian mysticism was pioneered by St. Teresa of Ávila and St. John of the Cross, both from converso families. Other conversos, such as Luis de Carvajal, helped to carry this mystical revolution to the Spanish colonial frontier in the Americas. Carvajal, who lived as a crypto-­Jew in colonial Mexico, penned a mystical autobiography detailing the journey of his alter ego, Joseph Lumbroso, that was reminiscent of the writings of other converso and Jewish mystics of the age. Culturally, the difficult path of migration and resettlement amid other groups of Jews fostered a sense of community among the Sephardic exiles, bound up in nostalgia for Spain and Portugal. Songs and proverbs emphasized the mythic quality of Sepharad as a lost homeland, and a new society arose that blended together the different regional elements of Iberian Jewry into a community that imagined a common Sephardic past. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews developed a distinct cultural diaspora within the wider Jewish world. They established long-­distance trading networks linking Jewish merchants in Mediterranean lands with conversos still living as Christians in Spain, Portugal, and

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their overseas empires. Sephardic merchants in Venice and Livorno helped to connect the communities of Salonika, Istanbul, and Cairo to those of London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Bordeaux. Throughout their long transition from the medieval to the modern world, the very instability and impermanence of their settlements in Christian and Muslim societies continued to foster common bonds among the Sephardim. The phenomena of displacement and transience in Sephardic life were central factors in the development of Sephardic networks that combined mutual economic and social benefit. For centuries the Sephardim turned their sprawling diaspora into a major locus of Jewish history, a model for preserving religious and cultural traditions, as well as for successfully relating to an ever-­changing cast of non-­Jewish authorities. Other Jews also found meaning in the memory of Sepharad, and medieval Spain became a touchstone for Jewish intellectual, cultural, and national identity throughout the Jewish diaspora. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, progressive Ashkenazi intellectuals known as maskilim seized on medieval Sepharad as an important symbol to be used in their efforts to recast Judaism in accordance with Enlightenment ideals. They viewed contemporary Sephardic communities as part of a longstanding tradition of cultural refinement that began with the Jewish scholars of medieval Spain, and lauded Sephardic history as a model to be emulated by all modern Jews. Beyond Europe as well, association with medieval Sepharad continued to carry with it an implicit cultural cosmopolitanism. For centuries those who claimed Sephardic heritage remained living symbols of the triumphs, tragedies, and resilience of the fabled communities of Jewish Spain. Today, as the remnants of this diaspora community continue to reconstitute themselves in new ways, they nurture memories of a lost world of medieval Spain, and of the Sephardic nation that flourished long afterward.

NOTES

Introduction 1.  Eliyahu Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain, 3 vols., trans. from the Hebrew by Aaron Klein and Jenny Machlowitz Klein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1973–84); and Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols., trans. from the Hebrew by Louis Schoffman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1961–66). Other formative works include Abraham Neuman, The Jews in Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1942); and Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 10 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 118–219. More recent surveys of Jewish history in Spain include Luis Suárez Fernández, Judíos españoles en la Edad Media (Madrid: Rialp, 1980); and Jane S. Gerber’s Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience (New York: Free Press, 1992), which covers both the medieval period and the subsequent Sephardic diaspora. While there is an extensive literature of scholarly works that cover particular regions, time periods, or themes of medieval Sephardic history, few treat the entirety of Jewish society in Spain over the course of the Middle Ages. 2.  Historiography on the notion of convivencia begins with Américo Castro, España en su historia: Cristianos, moros y judíos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1948), and Castro’s chief critic, Claudio Sánchez-­Albornoz, in his España: Un enigma histórico (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1956). 3.  As late as 694, the Seventeenth Council of Toledo demanded that baptized Jews should be enslaved to more trustworthy Christians as a means of finally breaking their independence and ties to Judaism. For a summary of the history and historiographic problems surrounding the question of Jewish history under the Visigoths, see Hagith Sivan, “The Invisible Jews of Visigothic Spain,” Revue des études juives 159 (2000): 369–85; and Rachel L. Stocking, “Early Medieval Christianity and Anti-­Judaism: The Case of the Visigothic Kingdom,” Religion Compass 2 (2008): 642–58. 4.  For the Jews of Portugal, see Maria José Pimenta Ferro Tavares, Los judíos en Portugal (Madrid: MAPFRE, 1992).

Chapter 1 1.  Peter Cole, The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 164. 2.  Medieval Muslim societies did not preserve the sorts of royal or notarial records that exist for much of medieval Europe, and the one great treasure trove of sources for Jews in medieval Muslim lands, the Cairo Geniza, is a North African source that takes in the communities of Al-­Andalus only peripherally. 3.  See the seminal work of S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Genizah, 6 vols. (Berkeley:

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University of California Press, 1967–93). Eliyahu Ashtor, who drew on many of the same Geniza sources as Goitein and had no less sweeping a vision of the nature of his subject, produced a three-­volume history of Andalusi Jewry. His The Jews of Moslem Spain, which first appeared in Hebrew in 1960, is a masterful yet deeply flawed work that builds a grand narrative of Jewish cultural accomplishment. More recent studies of Andalusi Jewry have been narrower in scope but have likewise focused almost exclusively on intellectual culture. See Ross Brann, Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh-­and Twelfth-­Century Islamic Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Esperanza Alfonso, Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes: Al-­Andalus from the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries (London: Routledge, 2008). A fusion of Ashtor, Goitein, and older historiographic approaches to the golden age is offered by Raymond P. Scheindlin in “Merchants and Intellectuals, Rabbis and Poets: Judeo-­Arabic Culture in the Golden Age of Islam,” in Cultures of the Jews, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken, 2002), 313–88. 4.  With little to go on, histories of the period have focused on Jewish legal and social status on the eve of the Muslim conquest. Contrasting the Jews’ treatment by the Visigoths with more accepting attitudes of Muslim lords from a much later period, historians have traditionally presented the advent of Muslim rule in Iberia as a welcome reprieve from decades of Christian oppression. Jane S. Gerber, The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience (New York: Free Press, 1992), 5–26; and Norman Roth, Jews, Visigoths and Muslims in Medieval Spain: Cooperation and Conflict (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 7–43. While it is reasonable to assume that Jews took part in a larger migration from the Near East and North Africa to Iberia after the Muslim conquest, there is nothing to support Eliyahu Ashtor’s assertion that there was a large exodus of Jews from Visigothic Spain to North Africa, followed by a “veritable flood of emigration” of these Jews and other Jews from Arab lands back to Spain in the years following 711. Eliyahu Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1984), 29–30. We possess only a handful of sources relating to the Jewish role in the Muslim conquests of the early eighth century, and many of these date from well after this period and all offer a fairly tendentious treatment of the Jew’s role in the establishment of Muslim hegemony in the region. Careful readings of these sources can be found in Fred Astren, “Re-­Reading the Arabic Sources: Jewish History and the Muslim Conquests,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 36 (2009): 83–130; and Michael Toch, “Mehr Licht: Eine Entgegnung zu Friedrich Lotter,” Aschkenas 11 (2001): 465–529, at 474–77. 5.  Moshe Gil, Jews in Islamic Countries in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 676–79; and Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-­Razi, Crónica del Moro Rasis, ed. Diego Catalán (Madrid: Gredos, 1975), 262. 6.  On Ibn Shaprut, see Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain, vol. 1, 155–227; and Roth, Jews, Visigoths and Muslims, 79–86. 7. Cole, Dream of the Poem, 6; and Franz Kobler, Letters of Jews Through the Ages, vol. 1 (New York: East and West Library, 1978), 98. 8.  Sa’id al-­Andalusi, Science in the Medieval World: Book of the Category of Nations, ed. and trans. Sema’an I. Salem and Alok Kumar (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 80–81. 9.  Gerson D. Cohen, A Critical Edition with a Translation and Notes of The Book of Tradition (Sefer Ha-­Qabbalah by Abraham ibn Daud) (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1967), 63. The term “Maghreb” generally refers to the region of Northwest Africa. Here “Maghreb” refers more specifically to the area of modern-­day Morocco, and “Ifriqiya” to that of Algeria and Tunisia.

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10. Cohen, Book of Tradition, 66. The indication here is that the religious autonomy of their Jewish subjects from Baghdadi Jewish institutions helped to legitimize Umayyad authority vis-­ à-­vis the Abbasids. 11.  Ibid. The date 4750 = 989–90  ce, and would have been after the reign of ‘Abd ar-­ Rahman III. 12. Ibid. 13.  In his classic discussion of Jewish leadership in medieval Muslim lands, Salo Baron emphasized solidarity among the intellectual elite over factionalism and sociopolitical rivalry, writing that “despite occasional rivalries, even minor manifestations of xenophobia, foreign Jewish scholars were assured brotherly reception in most communities.” This assessment is, however, overly idealistic. Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 5. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 53. 14.  On Ibn Abitur, see Eliyahu Ashtor, Jews of Moslem Spain, vol. 1, 356–69; and Judit M. Targarona Borrás, “Breves notas sobre Yosef Ibn Abitur,” Miscelanéa de estudios Árabes y Hebraicos 33 (1982): 53–85. For the best account of the social and political framework of Sephardic independence, see Gerson D. Cohen, “The Story of the Four Captives,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 29 (1960–61): 118–21, and passim. 15.  Jacob Mann, The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine Under the Fatimid Caliphs, 2 vols. (Oxford: Humphrey Milford, 1920), vol. 2, 67–70, and the sources listed in Cohen, “Four Captives,” 72, n. 72. 16.  David Wasserstein, “Samuel ibn Naghrilla Ha-­Nagid and Islamic Historiography in al-­ Andalus,” Al-­Qantara 14 (1993): 109–25, at 113. 17.  David Wasserstein, “Jewish Élites in al-­Andalus,” in The Jews of Medieval Islam, ed. Daniel Frank (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 109; and Michael Toch, The Economic History of European Jews: Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 113–14. Elka Klein estimated that there were only about sixty Jewish households in Barcelona in the late eleventh century, in what constituted a relatively large Jewish center. Elka Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 36–39. The tenth century, which so dramatically marks the rise of Jewish political and intellectual culture in al-­Andalus, also appears to have been a major turning point with regard to Jewish economic expansion that ended a long period of stagnation and depression. 18.  We have evidence of Jewish study circles in Lucena as early as the ninth century, but it indicates a developing center still in need of instruction from the Baghdadi Geonim. Joseph Rivlin, “Rav Eleazar bar Samuel de Lucena,” Iberia Judaica 3 (2011): 173–87. Some sources from the period refer to Lucena as al-­Yahud (“of the Jews”), as they do for Tarragona and Granada, but it isn’t clear what exactly this meant. It is highly unlikely that these were full Jewish cities but rather Jewish villages or sections of cities. In the case of Granada, in particular, the city had a majority Muslim population from quite early on. See the comments attributed to Natronai Gaon in Kevutsat Hakhamim: Kolei divre mada’ peri ‘eshtonot hakhamim shonim, ed. W. Warnheim (Tel Aviv: Hotsa’at Tsiyon, 1970) 110–11; Muhammed ibn Muhammed al-­Idrisi, Description de l’Afrique et de l’Espagne par Edrisi, ed. Reinhart Dozy (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 191 (Arabic), 231 (French); and Robert Brody, “Rav ‘Amram bar Sheshna—Gaon of Sura?” (Hebrew), Tarbiz 56 (1987): 327–45. 19.  Norman Roth, “New Light on the Jews of Mozarabic Toledo,” AJS Review 11 (1986): 189–220, at 191. 20.  Indeed, even the practical reach of the Geonim and Exilarch of Baghdad, the most powerful political figures in the medieval Jewish world, was quite restricted. See Robert Brody,

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The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 21.  See the documents in Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and a Sourcebook (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979), 171–82. 22.  Joseph Rivlin, Bills and Contracts from Lucena: From the Eleventh Century [Hebrew] (Ramat-­Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1994), 150–51, and 119–20. 23.  Menahem Ben Sasson, “Al-­Andalus: The So-­Called ‘Golden Age’ of Spanish Jewry—A Critical View,” in Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries), ed. Christoph Cluse (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 123–37, at 133. 24.  Jewish merchants were attacked, kidnapped, and killed in both Muslim and Christian Spain. Mordechai A. Friedman, “An India Trader’s Partnership in Almería (1139),” Sefarad 76 (2016): 75–96, at 80; Travis Bruce, “The Taifa of Denia and the Jewish Networks of the Medieval Mediterranean: A Study of the Cairo Geniza and Other Documents,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 10 (2018): 147–66; and Isaac ben Jacob Alfasi, Responsa of R. Isaac ben Jacob Alfasi, ed. Wolf Leiter (Pittsburgh: Mekhon Ha-­Rambam, 1954), nos. 72 and 288. On the endemic nature of poverty in the Middle Ages, see Mark R. Cohen, The Voice of the Poor in the Middle Ages: An Anthology of Documents from the Cairo Geniza (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 25.  Joel Müller, Teshuvot geone mizrach u-­ma’arav (Berlin: P. Deutsch, 1888), no. 162. 26.  For Denia, see Alfasi, Responsa, no. 132. For Halevi, see S. D. Goitein, “The Biography of Rabbi Judah Ha-­Levi in Light of the Cairo Geniza Documents,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 28 (1959): 41–56, at 48; and Goitein, “Judaeo-­Arabic Letters from Spain (Early Twelfth Century),” in Orientalia Hispanica sive studia F. M. Pareja octogenario dicata, 2 vols., ed. J. M. Barral (Leiden: Brill, 1974), vol. 1, 331–50. 27. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 3, 332; Müller, Teshuvot geone mizrach u-­ma’arav, no. 204; and Toch, Economic History of European Jews, 248. On the lives of Jewish women in other parts of the medieval Muslim world, see Eve Krakowski, Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Female Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 28.  Mordechai A. Friedman, “Divorce Upon the Wife’s Demand as Reflected in Manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza,” Jewish Law Annual 4 (1981): 103–26, at 125. 29.  Ibn Migash, Responsa (Salonika, 1591), no. 118. On Jews turning to Muslim judges, see also Ibn Migash, Responsa, no. 106, and, generally, Uriel I. Simonsohn, A Common Justice: The Legal Allegiances of Christians and Jews Under Muslim Rule (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 30. Toch, Economic History of European Jews, 141–42. Some Jews also partnered with non-­ Jews in the ownership of animal herds as well. A rabbinic responsum records a Jew from Muslim Toledo owning a flock of sheep with a Christian. Ibn Migash, Responsa (Jerusalem, 2017), no. 6. 31. Müller, Teshuvot geone mizrach u-­ma’arav, no. 178. See also Alfasi, Responsa, no. 184, for a similar case of the first fruits of the land being used as repayment of a loan that the borrower could not repay directly. 32. Rivlin, Bills and Contracts from Lucena, 104–5; and Toch, Economic History of European Jews, 218–19. 33. Cole, Dream of the Poem, 6. 34.  Jessica L. Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Phillip Ackerman-­Lieberman, The Business of Identity:

Notes to Pages 25–30

277

Jews, Muslims, and Economic Life in Medieval Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). 35.  Friedman, “An India Trader’s Partnership.” 36. Alfasi, Responsa, no. 216. 37.  Jessica L. Goldberg notes: “Travel direct between Spain and Egypt was possible, but it essentially varies from rare to extremely rare over the period.” Jessica Goldberg, “On Reading Goitein’s Mediterranean Society: A View from Economic History,” Mediterranean Historical Review 26 (2011): 171–86, at 176; and Goldberg, “The Use and Abuse of Commercial Letters from the Cairo Geniza,” Journal of Medieval History 38 (2012): 127–54, at 134. 38.  Moreover, it was Qayrawan (Tunisia), not any of the cities in Iberia, that was the true mercantile hub of Jewish life in the western Mediterranean during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Talya Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), chap. 2; and Ben Sasson, Emergence of the Local Jewish Community in the Muslim World: Qayrawan, 800– 1057 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996). 39.  Amnon Linder, Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2000), no. 575; and Alfasi, Responsa, no. 224. 40. Jessica Goldberg writes about “individual geographies of trade” rather than the involvement of national or regional groups. Goldberg, Trade and Institutions, 247–76, and 313. 41. Ashtor, Moslem Spain, vol. 1, 271. 42. Toch, Economic History of European Jews, 201–3; and Maya Shatzmiller, “Professions and Ethnic Origins of Urban Labourers in Muslim Spain: Evidence from a Moroccan Source,” Awraq 5–6 (1982): 145–59, at 152–53. 43. Alfasi, Responsa, no. 46. 44.  See Abu Ishaq of Elvira and the Tunisian Ibn al-­Kardabus, who noted that Muslim rulers had jeopardized Andalusi society by allowing Jews to act as viziers and secretaries. Mercedes García-­Arenal, “The Jews of al-­Andalus,” in A History of Jewish-­Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day, ed. Abdelwahab Meddeb and Michael Stora (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 118. 45.  Alejandro García-­Sanjuán, “Jews and Christians in Almoravid Seville as Portrayed by the Muslim Jurist Ibn ‘Abdun,” Medieval Encounters 14 (2008): 78–98, at 85–86, and 98. 46.  Edwin Seroussi, “Music in Medieval Ibero-­Jewish Society,” Hispania Judaica 5 (2007): 5–67, at 29–31. 47.  Bruce, “The Taifa of Denia and the Jewish Networks,” 152; and Roth, Jews, Visigoths and Muslims, 191–94. 48.  Alejandro García-­Sanjuán, Till God Inherits the Earth: Islamic Pious Endowments in al-­ Andalus (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 43, 49, and 91; and Alfasi, Responsa, nos. 75, 165, 243. 49.  See Ibn ‘Abd al-­Ra’uf of Córdoba and other Maliki jurists as recorded by the ninth-­ century chronicler ‘Abd al-­Malik ibn Habib, and Ibn Abdun’s market regulations in twelfth-­ century Seville in García-­Sanjuán, “Jews and Christians in Almoravid Seville,” 83 and 92. 50.  Steven Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis Under Early Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 20–24. 51.  Steven Wasserstrom, “‘The Shi‘is Are the Jews of Our Community’: An Interreligious Comparison Within Sunni Thought,” Israel Oriental Studies 14 (1994): 297–325. 52.  Maribel Fierro, “Religious Dissension in al-­Andalus: Ways of Exclusion and Inclusion,” Al-­Qantara 22 (2001): 463–87, at 466–67; Amira K. Bennison, “Relations Between Rulers and

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Ruled in the Medieval Maghrib: The ‘Social Contract’ in the Almoravid and Almohad Centuries, 1050–1250,” Comparative Islamic Studies 10 (2014): 137–56, at 153; and Mercedes García-­ Arenal, “Jewish Converts to Islam in the Muslim West,” Israel Oriental Studies 17 (1997): 227–48, at 236. On the deterioration of Jewish status under the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties, see Chapter 2 in this volume. 53.  Bennison, “Relations Between Rulers and Ruled,” 147. 54.  María Angeles Gallego, “The Languages of Medieval Iberia and Their Religious Dimension,” Medieval Encounters 9 (2003): 107–39, at 138. 55.  García-­Arenal, “Jews of al-­Andalus,” 124; Camilla Adang, Islam frente al Judaísmo: La polémica de Ibn Hazm de Córdoba (Madrid: Aben Ezra Ediciones, 1994). 56.  Translated by Bernard Lewis in Medieval Iberia, ed. O. R. Constable, 97–98. 57. Roth, Jews, Visigoths and Muslims, 102–9. 58.  Bezalel Safran, “Ibn Paquda’s Attitude Toward the Courtier Class,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 154–95. 59.  David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Donald Kagay, “Violence Management in Twelfth-­Century Catalonia and Aragon,” in Marginated Groups in Spanish and Portuguese History, ed. William D. Phillips, Jr. and Carla Rahn Phillips (Minneapolis, MN: Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, 1989), 11–22. On institutionalized and latent violence against women, see M. J. Fuente, “Más allá del amor: Mujeres moras y judías víctimas de la violencia en la castilla del siglo XV,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma 30 (2017): 309–33. 60.  Cited in Alfonso, Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes, 24–25. 61. Moses ibn Ezra, Kitab al-­Muhadarah wal-­Mudhakarah, 119v–120, cited in Alfonso, Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes, 43. 62.  Ross Brann, The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 79–80. 63. Aharon Maman, “The Flourishing Era of Jewish Exegesis in Spain: The Linguistic School,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, vol. 1, ed. Magne Saebo (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2000), 264–66. 64.  Judah Alharizi, The Book of Tahkemoni, ed. and trans. David Simha Segal (Portland, OR: Littman Library, 2001), 180. 65.  Ibid., 349–50. 66.  Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 90. 67.  On prayer sung in Arabic, see Alfasi, Responsa, no. 281; and Seroussi, “Music in Medieval Ibero-­Jewish Society,” 12. For the siddur of Rav Amram Gaon, see Brody, Geonim of Babylonia, 92. 68. Alfasi, Responsa, no. 87. Samuel ibn Naghrilla showed a concern that synagogue services could last too long. Ismar Elbogen and Raymond P. Scheindlin, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993), 154. 69. Alharizi, Book of Tahkemoni, Gate 24. See also Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 2, 159. 70.  Judah ben Barzillay al-­Bargeloni, Sefer ha-­Ittim, ed. Yaacov Schorr (Berlin, 1903), 264, no. 178. 71. Adena Tanenbaum, “The Andalusian Selihah and Its Individualistic Conception of Penitence,” in Be’erot Yitzhak: Studies in Memory of Isadore Twersky, ed. Jay Harris (Cambridge,

Notes to Pages 39–48

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MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 377–98, at 382–83; and Raymond P. Scheindlin, “Contrasting Religious Experience in the Liturgical Poems of Ibn Gabirol and Halevi,” Prooftexts 13 (1993): 141–62, 152. 72.  Al-­Bargeloni, Sefer ha-­Ittim, 253. 73.  Dunash ibn Labrat, “There Came a Voice, Awake!” in Wine, Women, and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life, ed. Raymond P. Scheindlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 41–42. 74.  Solomon B. Freehof, “The Structure of the Birchos ha-­Shachar,” Hebrew Union College Annual 23 (1950–51): 339–54, at 340. 75.  Alberdina Houtman, “Role of the Targum in Jewish Education in Medieval Europe,” in A Jewish Targum in a Christian World (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 81–98, at 91. 76.  Isaac Alfasi gives evidence of scholars trying to protect rabbinic authority while, if necessary, bending to popular will. Ron Kleinman, “The Power of Monetary Customs to Override the Law: On the Innovative Approach of Rabbi Isaac Alfasi and His Influence on Medieval Spanish Rabbis,” Jewish Law Association Studies 19 (2009): 110–29, at 114–16. 77.  Ibn Migash, Responsa, 95; and Alfasi, Responsa (Leghorn, 1781), no. 223. 78.  Michael Walzer et al., eds., The Jewish Political Tradition, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 398. 79.  Ibn Migash, Responsa, no. 114. 80. Ibid. 81. Leon J. Weinberger, Jewish Prince in Moslem Spain: Selected Poems of Samuel Ibn Nagrela (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1973), 98–99. 82.  Steven Harvey, “Alghazali and Maimonides and Their Books of Knowledge,” in Be’erot Yitzhak: Studies in Memory of Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 99–117, at 111–13. 83.  In contrast to the way they are depicted in “The Story of the Four Captives” in Ibn Daud’s Book of Tradition, the great Andalusi rabbis of Córdoba and Lucena were as much the successors of Qayrawan as of Baghdad. The Jewish centers of al-­Andalus rose to prominence only after the sacking of Qayrawan in 1057. On the importance of the Sephardic treatment of Talmud in the High Middle Ages, see Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud, 72–78. 84. Generally, see Ashtor, Moslem Spain, vol. 1, 13–138. On David ben Saadia, see Zvi Stampfer, “Jewish Law in Eleventh-­Century Spain: The Kitab al-­Hawi of Rabbi David ben Saadia,” [Hebrew] Shenaton ha-­mishpat ha-­ivri 23 (2008): 217–36. 85.  Ángel Sáenz Badillos, “El contacto intellectual de musulmanes y judíos: gramática y exegesis,” in Judíos y musulmanes en al-­Andalus y el Maghreb, vol. 1, ed. Maribel Fierro (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2002), 29-­58, at 32. 86.  Daniel J. Lasker, “Karaism in Twelfth-­Century Spain,” Jewish Thought and Philosophy 1 (1992): 175–95; and Sarah Stroumsa, “The Mu‘tazila in al-­Andalus: The Footprints of a Phantom,” Intellectual History of the Islamic World 2 (2014): 80–100, at 95. 87.  Cited in Kobler, Letters of Jews, vol. 1, 101. 88. Cohen, Book of Tradition, 97–98; and Moses ibn Ezra, Kitab al-­Muhadarah wal-­ Mudhakarah, 54 [29b], cited in Ross Brann, “The Arabized Jews,” in The Literature of al-­Andalus, ed. María Rosa Menocal, Raymond Scheindlin, and Michael Sells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 435-­54, at 448. For most Jews the term “Sephardic” was generally a geographic designation and not yet a marker of communal consciousness. Those Andalusi Jews who immigrated to other Mediterranean lands might identify themselves as Sephardim,

280

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Andalusis, or as being from a particular town (Toledo, Madrid, etc.). However, these émigrés did not form distinct Sephardic synagogues or kehillot. Rather, they blended with the larger group of “Westerners” (Maghrebis), joining their communities and communal institutions. Moshe Gil, “Palestine During the First Muslim Period (634–1099): Addenda and Corrigenda” [in Hebrew], Te‘uda 7 (1991): 281–345, at 301. 89.  On the importance of genealogical claims in the medieval Jewish world, see Arnold E. Franklin, This Noble House: Jewish Descendants of King David in the Medieval Islamic East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 90.  Göran Larson, Ibn García’s Shu‘ubiyya Letter: Ethnic and Theological Tensions in Medieval al-­Andalus (Leiden: Brill, 2003); David Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002–1086 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 169–73; and Jane S. Gerber, “Pride and Pedigree: The Development of the Myth of Sephardic Aristocratic Lineage,” in Reappraisals and New Studies of the Modern Jewish Experience, ed. Brian Smollett and Christian Wiese (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 85–103. 91.  Moses ibn Ezra, Kitab al-­Muhadarah wal-­Mudhakarah, 77, cited in Ann Brener, Judah Halevi and His Circle of Hebrew Poets in Granada (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 83. 92.  Ibn Ezra, Kitab al-­Muhadarah wal-­Mudhakarah, 73, cited in Joseph Dana, “Natural Qualifications for a Medieval Poet According to Moshe ibn Ezra,” Journal of Semitic Studies 41 (1996): 251–61, at 251. 93. Alharizi, Book of Tahkemoni, 177. 94.  Dov Yarden, Diwan Shemuel ha-­Nagid, [Ben Tehilim] (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Hebrew Union College Press, 1966), no. 21. 95. Alfonso, Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes, 40. 96.  In one poem, the poet sees the dome of a palace and is struck with its social meaning: Beauty arises only with financial patronage. Later in the same poem, however, the poet suggests that it is he who, like Solomon, has the power over time and space. Raymond P. Scheindlin, “Poet and Patron: Ibn Gabirol’s Poem of the Palace and Its Gardens,” Prooftexts 16 (1996): 31-­47, at 33 and 40–41. 97.  Jonathan Decter, “The Jewish Ahl-­al Adab of al-­Andalus,” Journal of Arabic Literature 50 (2019): 325–341. 98. Ashtor, Jews of Moslem Spain, vol. 1, 160–70; Ángel Sáenz-­Badillos, “Menahem and Dunash in Search of the Foundations of Hebrew Language,” Studia Orientalia 95 (2003): 177– 90; and Jonathan Ray, “The Jews of al-­Andalus: Factionalism in the Golden Age,” in Jews and Muslims in the Islamic World, ed. Zvi Zohar (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2013), 253–64. 99.  Esperanza Alfonso, “Los límites del saber: Reacción de intelectuales judíos a la cultura de procedencia islámica,” in Judíos y musulmanes en al-­Andalus y el Magreb, ed. Maria Isabel Fierro (Madrid: Casa de Velazquez, 2002), 62–63. 100.  Teshubot de los Discípulos de Menahem contra Dunash ben Labrat, ed. and trans. Santiaga Benavente Robles (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1986), 15–16, Hebrew section. 101.  Teshubot de Yehudi ben Sheshet, ed. and trans. María Encarnación Varela Moreno (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1981). 102. Jonah ibn Janah, perhaps the leading Jewish philologist of the Middle Ages and another vociferous champion of Sephardic linguistic supremacy, would glorify his native Sephardic genealogy while also castigating his fellow Sephardim for not engaging in the science of grammar, as did the Arabs. Norman Roth, “Jewish Reactions to ‘Arabiyya and the Renaissance

Notes to Pages 53–63

281

of Hebrew in Spain,” Journal of Jewish Studies 28 (1983): 63–84, at 80. In an odd twist of fate, Menahem’s fame would be revived outside of the Sephardic sphere, by Ashkenazi scholars such as Rashi and his grandson, Rabbenu Tam. Ángel Sáenz-­Badillos and Judit Targarona, eds., Gramáticos hebréos de al-­Andalus (Córdoba: El Almendro, 1988), 38.

Chapter 2 1.  Cited in M. García-­Arenal, “Jews of al-­Andalus,” 118. 2.  Western histories of medieval Spain once presented the Almoravids and, even more so, the Almohad dynasty that followed them, as little more than religious fanatics whose rustic militarism was juxtaposed with the cosmopolitan attitudes of their Arab predecessors in al-­Andalus. More recent scholarship has offered a much more nuanced portrait. Camilo Gómez-­Rivas, Law and the Islamicization of Morocco Under the Almoravids (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Amira  K. Bennison, Almoravid and Almohad Empires (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); and Maribel Fierro, The Almohad Revolution: Politics and Religion in the Islamic West During the Twelfth–Thirteenth Centuries (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012). On Jewish life under these dynasties, see García-­Arenal, “Jewish Converts to Islam in the Muslim West”; Amira K. Bennison and María Ángeles Gallego, “Jewish Traders in Fes,” Miscelánea de Estudios Árabes y Hebreos 56 (2007): 33–51; María Ángeles Gallego, “The Calamities That Followed the Death of Joseph Ibn Migash,” in Judaeo-­Arabic Culture in al-­Andalus, ed. Amir Ashur (Córdoba: Oriens Academics, 2013), 79–98; Alfonso, Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes, 105ff; and García-­Sanjuán, “Jews and Christians in Almoravid Seville.” 3.  Bennison, “Relations Between Rulers and Ruled,” 145. 4.  García-­Sanjuán, “Jews and Christians in Almoravid Seville,” 85. 5.  Ibid., 85, 86, 97. 6.  These fears resulted in the deportation of thousands of Christians to North Africa. 7.  This was much the same in Christian legal texts from Christian Iberia where the locution “Moors and Jews” was common, or in Jewish legal and texts where the category “the nations” to refer to all non-­Jews was also standard. 8.  Maribel Fierro, “Conversion, Ancestry, and Universal Religion,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 2 (2010): 155–73, at 155. 9. Kraemer, Maimonides, 89. 10.  García-­Arenal, “Jews in al-­Andalus,” 118. 11.  Cited in Exile in the Maghreb: Jews Under Islam—Sources and Documents, 997–1912, ed. Paul B. Fenton and David G. Littman (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016), 55. 12.  García-­Arenal, “Jewish Converts to Islam in the Muslim West,” 238. For similar events in the mid-­fifteenth century, see Mercedes García-­Arenal, “The Revolution of Fas 869/1465 and the Death of Sultan ‘Abd al-­Haqq al-­Marini,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 41 (1978): 43–66. 13.  Ibn ‘Aqnin, in Exile in the Maghreb, ed. Fenton and Littman, 51. 14. Ibid. 15.  Abraham S. Halkin and David Hartman, Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985); and Leon D. Stitskin, Letters of Maimonides (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1977). 16.  Cited in Exile in the Maghreb, 50–51. 17.  Cited in Gerson D. Cohen, The Book of Tradition, 96–97.

282

Notes to Pages 63–69

18.  Ibid., 97–98. 19.  On Jewish courtiers, see Jonathan Decter, “Before Caliphs and Kings: Jewish Courtiers in Medieval Iberia,” in The Jew in Medieval Iberia, ed. Jonathan Ray (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 1–32. 20. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 83–85. 21. Toch, Economic History of European Jews, 114. Indeed, Babylonia Geonim answered questions from Barcelona, as well as Lucena, during the ninth century. 22. Javier Castaño González, “Los documentos hebreos de Leon en su context pre-­ notorial,” Judaismo Hispano 2 (2003): 459–81, at 469; Joaquim Miret y Sans and Moïse Schwab, “Documents de juifs barcelonnais au XI siècle,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, Tomo 69 (1916): 569–83; and Elka Klein, Hebrew Deeds of Catalan Jews: 1117–1316 (Barcelona: Societat Catalana d’Estudis Hebraics, 2004), 19. 23.  For León, see Roger Collins, Early Medieval Spain (London: Macmillan, 1983), 263–66. For Barcelona, see Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 36–39. 24. Archivo de la Catedral de Burgos, no. 40. On other Jewish settlements along the Camino, see Francisco Cantera Burgos, Las juderías españolas y el Camino de Santiago (Pamplona: Diputación Foral de Navarra, 1976). See also the mention of an established Jewish community at Palencia in 1177, not far from the main route of the Camino, in El reino de Castilla en época de Alfonso VIII, 3 vols., ed. Julio González, (Madrid: CSIC, 1960), vol. 2, 455–56. 25.  Los judíos del reino de Navarra: Documentos 1334–1350, ed. Juan Carrasco, Fermín Miranda García, and Eloísa Ramírez Vaquero (Pamplona: Príncipe de Viana, 1995), 703–4. 26. Manuel Carriedo Tejedo, “Registro judío de León (897–1297),” Tierras de León 46 (2008): 34–64. 27.  Cited in Haim Beinart, “The Jews in Castile,” in The Sephardi Legacy, 2 vols., ed. Haim Beinart (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992), vol. 1, 22. 28.  Manuel Carriedo Tejedo, “Judíos en la provincia de ‘Gallaecia’ hasta el Concilio de Coyanza [1055],” Estudios Mindonienses 24 (2008): 305–82, at 318. 29.  The Kingdom of Portugal emerged in the twelfth century from the County of Portugal, a dependency of the Kingdom of León. 30. Linder, Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages, no. 575. The letter by Judah Halevi, written from Christian Toledo, regarding the ransom of a Jewish woman, shows the coordinated efforts of Jews in Christian-­and Muslim-­controlled cities. Goitein, “Judaeo-­Arabic Letters from,” 332–34. See also Alfasi, Responsa (Leghorn, 1781), nos. 223 and 224. 31.  Thomas Barton, Contested Treasure: Jews and Authority in the Crown of Aragon (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2015), 49. 32. Fritz Baer, Die Juden im christlichen Spanien, 2 vols. (Berlin: Akademie-­ Verlag, 1929/1936), vol. 1, 4. 33.  Published in Robert Chazan, Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages (New York: Behrman House, 1980), 58. 34. “eo quod tenebat ipse Menindus Gundesalviz suos hebreos in sua casa, qui faciebant suo mercatum, et de homines plures.” José M. Andrade, O Tombo de Celanova: Estudio introductorio, edición e índices (ss. IX–XII) (Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura Galega, 1994), vol. 1, 504, and Baer, Die Juden im christlichen Spanien, vol. 2, 3, no. 6. 35. Toch, Economic History of European Jews, 143–44 and 146. 36.  Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-­Castilla Under King Alfonso VI (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 95.

Notes to Pages 71–77

283

37.  For Miranda de Ebro, Karta inter Christians et Judaeos de Foros Illorum, in Colección de fueros municipales y cartas pueblas de los reinos de Castilla, León, Corona de Aragón y Navarra, ed. Tomás Muñoz y Romero (Madrid: J. M. Alonso, 1847), 89. For Cuenca, Fuero de Cuenca, chapter 1, title 10. The mayordomia and merindadico were special taxes collected by the crown. 38.  For the original law prohibiting Jews from serving in the Roman imperial administration, see Amnon Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 323–26. The prohibition was reinstated for Toledo by Alfonso VII in 1118 based on the Visigothic Liber Judiciorum, XII. 2. 14. Colección de fueros municipales y cartas pueblas, 364–66. For the Fourth Lateran Council, see canon no. 68, published in Latin and English in The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, ed. Solomon Grayzel (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1933), 308–9. 39.  Yom Tov Assis, The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry (Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 1997), 3; Norman Roth, “The Civic Status of the Jew,” in Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle Ages, vol. 2, ed. P. E. Chevedden, D. J. Kagay, and P. G. Padilla (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 139–61. 40.  Max Gorosch, ed., El Fuero de Teruel (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1950). The above is a composite of titles 539, 540, 561, and 562. See also David Abulafia, “‘Nam iudei servi regis sunt, et semper fisico regio deputati’: The Jews in the Municipal ‘Fuero’ of Teruel (1176–7),” in Jews, Muslims and Christians in and Around the Crown of Aragon, ed. Harvey J. Hames (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 97–123. 41.  The translation is taken from Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 69–70. 42. Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 70–71. See also Cynthia Maya, “Jew and Muslim in Post-­Conquest Tortosa,” Al-­Masaq 10 (1998): 15–25. 43. Baer, Die Juden im christlichen Spanien, vol. 1, nos. 578–79, and the English translation in Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 72–73. 44. Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 72–73. 45. Alfonso, Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes, 78ff. 46.  “hi vero ubique parati sunt servire.” Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: Documents, 492–1404 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988), 35–36. 47. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-­Castilla, 352; and Roth, “New Light on the Jews of Mozarabic Toledo,” 198–200. 48.  Jaume I, Crónica o Llibre dels Feits, ed. Ferran Soldevila (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1982), nos. 44, 118, 436–37, and 439. 49.  Yom Tov Assis, “Diplomàtics jueus de la Corona catalanoaragonesa en terres musulmanes (1213–1327),” Tamid 1 (1997): 7–40; À. Masià i de Ros, Jaume II: Aragó, Granada i Marroc (Barcelona: CSIC, 1989), 23–28, 48, 151–52, 173–75, 257–59, and 480–81. 50.  Robert I. Burns, Diplomatarium of the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), no. 165a; and Juan Torres Fontes, Fueros y privilegios de Alfonso X el Sabio al reino de Murcia (Murcia: Academia Alfonso X el Sabio, 1973), 49. On the castle granted to a group of Jews by Ramon de Montcada II and the Templar preceptor of Tortosa, see John C. Shideler, A Medieval Catalan Noble Family: The Montcadas, 1000–1230 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 205–6. 51.  Philip Daileader, True Citizens: Violence, Memory, and Identity in the Medieval Community of Perpignan, 1162–1397 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 11. 52.  The translation is taken from Israel Abrahams’s Hebrew Ethical Wills (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1954), 59. The nasi (“prince”) Sheshet Benveniste was a Jewish

284

Notes to Pages 77–90

physician and diplomat active in Barcelona and Saragossa in the late twelfth century. On Ibn Tibbon’s emphasis on the importance of literary and calligraphic style, see Abrahams, 68–69. 53.  On Samuel ibn Tibbon, see Abraham David, “R. Samuel Ibn Tibbon of Lunel as Translator of Maimonides’ Writings,” in Des Tibbonides à Maïmonide: Rayonnement del Juifs andalous en pays d’Oc medieval, ed. D. Iancu-­Agou and E. Nicolas (Paris: Cerf, 2009), 121–30; and Carlos Fraenkel, “From Maimonides to Samuel ibn Tibbon: Interpreting Judaism as a Philosophical Religion,” in Traditions of Maimonideanism, ed. Carlos Fraenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2009): 177–212. 54. Alfonso, Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes, 25. 55.  José Chabás, “Interactions Between Jewish and Christian Astronomers in the Iberian Peninsula,” in Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures, ed. Gad Freudenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 147–54. 56.  Seroussi, “Music in Medieval Ibero-­Jewish Society,” 25–26. 57. Alfonso, Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes, 25.

Chapter 3 1.  Cited in Mercedes Rubio, “The First Hebrew Encyclopedia of Science: Abraham Bar Hiyya’s Yesodei ha-­Tevunah u-­Migdal ha-­Emunah,” in The Medieval Encyclopedias of Science and Philosophy, ed. Steven Harvey (Dordrecht: Springer, 2000), 140, n. 2, with some slight modifications. 2.  Cited in Sefer ha-­Riqmah, ed. Michael Wilensky (Jerusalem: Ha-­Aqademia le-­lashon ha-­ ‘ivrit, 1964), 4–5. 3.  Yesod Mora, translated and annotated by H. Norman Strickman (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995), xix, and 39. The patron in question was Joseph ben Jacob. 4.  Bernard Septimus, “‘Open Rebuke and Concealed Love’: Nahmanides and the Andalusian Tradition,” in Rabbi Moses Nahmanides (Ramban): Explorations in His Religious and Literary Virtuosity, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 11–34. 5.  Yom Tov Assis, “The Judeo-­Arabic Tradition in Christian Spain,” in The Jews of Medieval Islam, ed. Daniel H. Frank (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 111–24, at 119. 6.  Cited in Gregg Stern, Philosophy and Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Interpretation and Controversy in Medieval Languedoc (New York: Routledge, 2009), 17. 7. Bernard Septimus, Hispano-­Jewish Culture in Transition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 45. 8. Anatoli, Malmad ha-­Talmidim, introduction, pp. 5a–b, cited in Stern, Philosophy and Rabbinic Culture, 15–16. 9. See Introduction by Jacob Anatoli to the Interpretation of ibn Rushd to the “Preface of Porphyry to Aristotle’s Logic,” in B. Z. Dinur, Israel in Exile, II, 6, pp. 255–26 [Heb], cit. in Ram Ben Shalom, “The Tibbonides’ Heritage and Christian Culture, Provence, c. 1186–c.1470,” in Des Tibbonides à Maïmonide: Rayonnement del Juifs andalous en pays d’Oc medieval, ed. D. Iancu-­ Agou and E. Nicolas (Paris: Cerf, 2009), 113, n. 3. 10.  Nahem Ilan, “Between an Oral Sermon and a Written Commentary: A Consideration of Rabbi Joseph ben Shoshan’s Polemic in his Avot Commentary,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 42 (2012): 183–99, at 195. 11.  Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 38.

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12.  Hartley Lachter, “The Politics of Secrets: Thirteenth-­Century Kabbalah in Context,” Jewish Quarterly Review 101 (2011): 505. 13.  Cited in Hartley Lachter, “The Jew as Master of Secrets in Thirteenth-­Century Castile,” in The Jew in Medieval Iberia, ed. Jonathan Ray (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 290. 14.  Moshe Idel, “Kabbalah and Elites in Thirteenth-­Century Spain,” Mediterranean Historical Review 9 (1994): 5–19. 15.  Cited in Harvey Hames, “Exotericism and Esotericism in Thirteenth-­Century Kabbalah,” Esoterica 6 (2004): 102–12, at 102. 16.  Ramban: Commentary on the Torah, 3 vols., trans. and ed. Charles Ber Chavel (New York: Shilo, 1974), vol. 1:7–8. See also Eric Lawee, “A Genre Is Born: The Genesis, Dynamics, and Role of Hebrew Exegetical Supercommentaries,” Revue des études juives 176 (2017): 295–332, at 326. 17.  Elliot Wolfson, “By Way of Truth: Aspects of Nahmanides’ Kabbalistic Hermeneutic,” AJS Review 14 (1989): 103–78, at 104–5. The conservative attitude toward disseminating kabbalistic knowledge remained strong throughout the early modern period. Andrea Gondos, Kabbalah in Print: The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism in Early Modernity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2021). 18.  Hartley Lachter, Kabbalistic Revolution: Reimagining Judaism in Medieval Spain (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014). 19.  Wolfson, “By Way of Truth,” 108. 20.  Harvey Hames, The Art of Conversion: Christianity and Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 21.  Septimus, “Open Rebuke,” 25. On Nahmanides’ commentaries, see Yosef Ofer and Jonathan Jacobs, Tosafot ramban le-­ferusho la-­torah shel-­nikhtevo be-­‘eres yisrael (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College and World Union of Jewish Studies, 2013); and Haviva Pedaya, Ha-­Ramban: Hit‘alut—Zeman mahzori ve-­tekst kadosh (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 2003), 98–110. 22.  After Psalms 75:11 and Esther 4:11. The sense here is that their “wickedness” will be stopped through excommunication, not actual execution. 23.  Ramban (Nachmanides): Writings and Discourses, trans. and ed. Charles Ber Chavel (New York: Shilo, 1978), 361–80. 24.  Ramban (Nachmanides). On Nahmanides’ attitudes toward the Maimonidean tradition, see James A. Diamond, Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 69–86. 25.  On the Disputation of Barcelona, Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols., trans. from the Hebrew by Louis Schoffman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1961–66), 1:152–62; Robert Chazan, “The Barcelona ‘Disputation’ of 1263,” Speculum 52 (1977): 824–42; and Nina Caputo, Nahmanides in Medieval Catalonia: History, Community, and Messianism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 91–127. 26.  Idel, “Kabbalah and Elites,” 17–18. 27.  Ibn Adret was particularly incensed at Abulafia’s apparent claims to possessing messianic prophecy. Adret, Responsa, vol. 1, no. 548. 28.  Cit. in Jacob Rader Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Sourcebook, 315–1791 (New York: Atheneum, 1983), 215–16. 29. Events surrounding the ban are illuminated by the letters collected in Abba Mari, Minhat Qen’aot, which have received a great deal of scholarly attention. See Ram ben Shalom, “The Ban Placed by the Community of Barcelona on the Study of Philosophy and Allegorical

286

Notes to Pages 102–113

Preaching—A New Study,” Revue des Études juives 159 (2000): 387–404; and Tamar Ron Marvin, “The Making of Minhat Qena’ot: The Controversy Over Ideational Transgression in Fourteenth-­ Century Jewish Occitania,” PhD diss., Jewish Theological Seminary, 2013. 30. Septimus, Hispano-­Jewish Culture in Transition, 114. 31.  Solomon ben Abraham ibn Adret, Sheelot u-­Teshuvot (Responsa), III:428 and III:394. 32.  For Isaac Ishmael as “Xudeu Maor dos xudeus moradores en esta vila,” see Maria Gloria de Antonio Rubio, Los Judios en Galicia (1044–1492) (La Coruña: Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza, 2006), doc. no. 5. For Saragossa, see Jean Régné, History of the Jews in Aragon: Regesta and Documents 1213–1327 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1978), no. 2060. 33.  Todros ben Judah Abulafia, Gan ha-­meshalim, ed. David Yellin (Jerusalem: Hotsa’at sefarim “Darom,” 1934), vol. 2, 134, no. 1. 34. Régné, History of the Jews in Aragon, nos. 355 and 844. 35.  Manuel F. Ladero Quesada, “Apuntes para la historia de los judíos y conversos de Zamora en la Edad Media (siglos XIII–XV),” Sefarad 48 (1988): 29–57. 36.  Irene Llop i Jordana, “Noves Dades de L’activitat dels jueus de Vic al Cabrerès (1345– 1348),” Ausa 26 (2013): 287–302, at 267 and 298. 37.  Victor Farías Zurita, “Privilegiamus et enfranchimus et libertatem perpetuo concedimus. Los judíos de una villa catalana y sus privilegios: El caso de Peralada, hacia 1300,” in Inversors, banquers i jueus: Les xaxes financeres a la Corona d’Aragó, ed. Pau Cateura Bennàsser, Jordi Maíz Chacón, and Lluís Tudela Villalonga (Palma: Edicions Documenta Balear, 2015), 109–20, at 113. 38.  Antonio Cea Gutierrez, “La Comunidad judía en la sierra de francia (Salamanca),” Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Poplares 43 (1988): 151–74, at 152. 39.  Teofilo F. Ruiz, Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 273. 40.  Robert I. Burns, Jews in the Notarial Culture: Latinate Wills in Mediterranean Spain, 1250–1350 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Rebecca Lynn Winer, “Jews in and out of Latin Notarial Culture: Analyzing Hebrew Notations on Latin Contracts in Thirteenth-­Century Perpignan and Barcelona,” in Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century, ed. Elisheva Baumgarten (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 113–33. 41.  Teofilo Ruiz, Crisis and Continuity, 190–92. 42.  Galo Sánchez, Libro de los fueros de Castiella (Barcelona: El Albir, 1981), title 3, no. 107. 43.  See Maya Soifer Irish, “The Problem of Old Debts: Jewish Moneylenders in Northern Castile (Belorado and Miranda del Ebro, ca. 1300),” Sefarad 74 (2014): 279–302. 44.  Cortes I, 104. 45. Baer, History, vol. 1, 120–37. 46.  On several occasions the papacy reprimanded the archbishop for his laxity in implementing the Lateran Council’s policies regarding the Jews. Demetrio Mansilla, ed., La documentación de Honorio III (Rome: Instituto español de historia eclesiastica, 1965), 115–16 and 163–64. 47. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World, 34. For the Jews in the Partidas, see Dwayne Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews: An Edition and Commentary on Siete Partidas 7.24 “de los judíos” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Robert I. Burns, “Jews and Moors in the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X the Learned: A Background Perspective,” in Medieval Spain— Culture, Conflict and Coexistence: Studies in Honor of Angus MacKay, ed. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 46–62.

Notes to Pages 114–122

287

48. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World, 35. 49.  Ibid., 34. 50.  Ibid., 36. 51.  Irene Llop i Jordana, “Settlement of the Jews in Vic: Origin, Provenance and Mobility of the Jewish Community (1231–1277),” Imago temporis. Medium Aevum 12 (2018): 253–84, at 265. 52. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World, 35. 53. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 206. 54.  Canon 68. See also the Decretals of Gregory IX, which appears to have influenced the Partidas. 55. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World, 36. 56.  Protection of Jewish rights to Sabbath observance was also in effect in the Crown of Aragon, but local communities still required rearticulation from time to time. Such was the case at Lérida in July of 1265. Régné, History of the Jews in Aragon, no. 336. 57. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World, 37. 58.  Ibid., 38. 59.  Ibid., 39. 60.  For canon 68, see Solomon Grayzel, Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, 308–9. On the badge, see Irven Resnick, Marks of Distinction (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2012), 80ff. 61.  These “outrages” may refer to sexual intercourse between Jews and Christians, or the rumor that Jews pretended to be Christians in order to kidnap Christian boys and sell them as slaves to Andalusi Muslims. The latter was claimed in a letter from Pope Gregory IX to the bishops of Córdoba and Baeza and dated 1239. Solomon Grayzel, Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, 244–45. 62. Daileader, True Citizens, 115. 63.  Yom Tov Assis, The Jews of Santa Coloma de Querralt: An Economic and Demographic Case Study of a Community at the End of the Thirteenth Century (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1988), 22–23. 64. Régné, History of the Jews in Aragon, no. 461, and Baer, Die Juden, vol. I, no. 136. This decision appears to have exacerbated tensions among the rival clans, and by 1284 we have notices that Avenbruch had been murdered. ACA, reg. 62, fol. 53v, and ACA, reg. 46, fol. 184; cit. in Régné, nos. 1118–19. 65.  Olivia Remie Constable, “Chess and Courtly Culture in Medieval Castile: The Libro de ajedrez of Alfonso X el Sabio,” Speculum 82 (2007): 301–47; John E. Keller and Annette Grant Cash, Daily Life Depicted in the Cantigas de Santa Maria (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998); and Vikki Hatton and Angus Mackay, “Anti-­Semitism in the Cantigas de Santa María,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 60 (1983): 189–99. 66.  Bonifacio Bartolomé Herrero, “Jews and Conversos in Medieval Segovia,” in Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, ed. Kevin Ingram and Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 15–33 at 19–21. 67.  Lines 36–39 of the Cantiga state: “Os judeus que a levaron / na camisa a leixaron / e logo a espensaron / dizendo: “alá yrá!” 68.  On Juan Gil de Zamora, see Pamela Patton, “Constructing the Inimical Jew in the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Theophilus’s Magician in Text and Image,” in Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-­Judaism and Anti-­Semitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, ed. Mitchell Merback (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 248–53.

288

Notes to Pages 127–133

Chapter 4 1. Carlos Carrete Parrondo, “Comunidades judías Castellano-­Leonesas,” in Juderías y sinagogas de la Sefarad medieval, ed. Ana María López Alvarez and Ricardo Izquierdo Benito (Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-­La Mancha, 2003), 365–83, at 369–71; and Ladero Quesada, “Apuntes para la historia de los judíos.” 2.  Cea Gutierrez, “La Comunidad judía en la sierra de francia (Salamanca),” 156. 3.  Ferran Garcia-­Oliver, “Govern local i lluita política a les aljames de la Corona d’Aragó,” in Cristianos y judíos en contacto en la Edad Media, ed. Flocel Sabaté and Claude Denjean (Lleida: Milenio, 2009), 707–31, at 710; and Mark D. Meyerson, Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom: Society, Economy, and Politics in Morvedre, 1348–1391 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 112–13, 121–24. 4. Baer, History, 191–95. 5.  For Castile, see Baer, Die Juden, vol. 2, 86. For the Crown of Aragon, see Yom Tov Assis, Jewish Economy in the Medieval Crown of Aragon, 1213–1327 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 8. On the eve of the riots of 1391, the total Jewish population of the Crown of Aragon was approximately 30,000, with 10,000 to 12,000 of those living in Catalonia. Miguel Angel Motis Dolader, “Las comunidades judías en el Aragón medieval,” in Aragón Sefarad (Zaragoza: Diputación de Zaragoza, 2004), 23–114, at 81, n. 19. 6.  Caroline Smith, “‘You Will Receive So Many Stab Wounds Here’: The Role of the Cathedral Chapter in the 1331 Girona Holy Week Riot,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 7 (2015): 135–49, at 142. 7.  In his landmark study, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, Yitzhak Baer was perhaps too willing to take such critiques of the moral turpitude of Jewish courtiers at face value. 8.  Hans Schadek, “Die Familiaren der aragonesischen Könige des 14. Und beginnenden 15. Jahrhunderts,” in Spanische Forschungen der Goerregesellschaft—Gesammelte Aufsästze zur Kulturgeschichte Spaniens 32 (1988): 1–148, at 54–55. 9.  Isabel Montes Romero-­Camacho, “El judío Sevillano don Yuçaf Pichón, contador mayor de Enrique II de Castilla (1369–1379),” in Judaismo hispano (Madrid: CSIC, 2002), 561–74. 10.  Ross Brann, Angel Sáenz-­Badillos, and Judit Targarona, “The Poetic Universe of Samuel Ibn Sasson: Hebrew Poet of Fourteenth Century Castile,” Prooftexts 16 (1996): 75–103, at 80. On the Jewish courtiers of Alfonso XI, see Baer, Die Juden, 2, no. 167; and Baer, History, 325–27. Although the post of almoxarife generally indicated a financial officer, nearly all Jewish courtiers at this time (including physicians) were involved in a wide variety of administrative activities from minting coins, handling taxes and other finances, and advising the king on various matters. 11. Baer, Die Juden, nos. 228, 258, 261–62, 396, and 460. 12.  At the Cortes of Soria in 1380, Jews lost their traditional right to govern themselves in criminal matters. See Baer, Die Juden, 2: 221. 13.  Alfonso X, Espéculo, ed. Robert A. MacDonald (Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1990), 178; and Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y Castilla, ed. Manuel Colmeiro (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1861–1903), 2: 223 and 236. For Don Çulema Alfajar, see Pilar León Tello, Judíos de Toledo, 2 vols. (Madrid: CSIC, 1979), vol. 1, 428; and Baer, Die Juden, 2: 228–29 and 242–44. 14.  Cortes I, 220. Even Jews who were not granted formal exemptions by the crown would still often bribe or otherwise influence royal officials to allow them to be excused from paying certain extraordinary taxes. Meyerson, Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 166–67.

Notes to Pages 133–137

289

15.  Cantera Montenegro, “La carne y el pescado en el Sistema alimentario judío en le España medieval,” Espacio, Tiempo, y Forma 16 (2003): 13–51, at 48. 16.  José Hinojosa Montalvo, “Médicos judíos en la ciudad de Valencia durante la baja edad media (ss. XIII y XIV),” in Estudos em homenagem ao Professor Doutor José Marques (Porto: Facultade de Letras da Universidad do Porto, 2006), 415–36, at 422. 17. Baer, Die Juden, vol. 1, no. 329. Marrying into one of the great franco families, such as the De la Cavallerías, brought with it a change in status. 18.  Máximo Diago Hernando, “La comunidad judía de Calatayud durante el siglo XIV: Introducción al estudio de su estructura social,” Sefarad 67 (2007): 327–65, at 337. For communal conflict among social classes, see Adret, Responsa, III: 380; and Yom Tov Assis, “Social Unrest and Class Struggle in Hispano-­Jewish Society Before the Expulsion,” (Hebrew) in Tarbut ve-­Historia, ed. Joseph Dan (Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, 1987), 121–45. 19.  José Hinojosa Montalvo, “La sociedad y la economía de los judíos en Castilla y la Corona de Aragón durante la Baja Edad Media,” in II Semana de Estudios Medievales, ed. José Ignacio de la Iglesia Duarte (Logroño: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 1992), 79–109; and Diago Hernando, “La comunidad judía de Calatayud.” On the mano mediana, see Asunción Blasco Martínez, “Judíos Zaragozanos comerciantes de tejidos del siglo XIV: Anotaciones biográficas,” Acta historica et archaeologica medieavalia 26 (2005): 587–612, at 601–2. 20.  Hinojosa Montalvo, “La sociedad y la economía de los judíos,” 84–85. 21. Baer, Die Juden, no. 181, 241–42. 22.  Manuel González Jiménez and Isabel Montes Romero-­Camacho, “Financieros judíos en la primera época de la repoblación del reino de Sevilla: La crisis del realengo en el concejo de Niebla (1262–1368),” Anuario de estudios medievales 29 (1999): 365–407; and Julio Valdeón Baruque, “Un pleito cristiano-­judío en la Sevilla del siglo XIV,” Historia. Instituciones. Documentos 1 (1974): 221–38. For the Ibn Shoshan family, see Isabel Mata López, “‘Estapiedra [sepulchral] es para memoria.’ Estudio filológico, literario e histórico de las inscripciones funerarias del cementerio judío de Toledo (siglos XII–XIV),” PhD diss. (Universidad de Salamanca, 2017), vol. 2, 500–504. 23. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 178–80; and Juan Leonardo Soler Milla, “Los judíos valenicanos, el mercado y las rutas mercantiles en el Mediterráneo medieval,” Revista de Historia Medieval 15 (2006–8): 87–108, at 99. For the way in which new and old clans came together in the task of communal government, see the case of the Valencian town of Morvedre in Meyerson, Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 169. 24. Michael Alexander Schraer, “Salamon Abnarrabi—A Jewish Rentier in Late Fourteenth-­Century Zaragoza,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 8 (2016): 94–109, at 100. 25. Alexandra Guerson, “Death in the Aljama of Huesca: Jews and Royal Taxation in Fourteenth-­Century Aragon,” Sefarad 75 (2015): 35–63. 26.  Yom Tov Assis, “El Comportament Sexual en la societat hispanojueva de l’edat mitjana,” Tamid 3 (2000–2001): 7–47, at 26; and Stephen Bensch, “A Baronial Aljama: The Jews of Empúries in the Thirteenth Century,” Jewish History 22 (2008): 19–51, at 40. On Sibili, see Elena Lourie, “Mafiosi and Malsines: Violence, Fear and Faction in the Jewish Aljamas of Valencia in the Fourteenth Century,” in Crusade and Colonisation: Muslims, Christians and Jews Under the Crown of Aragon (Hampshire: Variorum, 1990), 69–102, at 72–73. 27. Adret, Responsa, V:245 and 240; VII: 267; Perfet, Responsa, 132. 28. Adret, Responsa, V:267–69; I:179; III:291; Asher, Responsa, XIII: 12; and Yom Tov Assis, “Welfare and Mutual Aid in the Spanish Jewish Communities,” in Moreshet Sefarad, ed. Haim Beinart (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992), 318–45.

290

Notes to Pages 138–142

29.  Assis, “Welfare and Mutual Aid,” 320. Many references to hekdesh donations refer to charitable bequests broadly construed, and not necessarily to a central community chest that was maintained for those in need. 30.  Asunción Blasco Martínez, “Instituciones sociorreligiosas judías de Zaragoza (siglos XIV–XV): Sinagogas, cofradías, hospitales,” Sefarad 50 (1990): 3–46, 265–88, at 277–78; and José Luis Lacave, “Las juderías aragonesas al terminar del reinado de Fernando I,” Sefarad 39 (1979): 209–24, at 221–22. For Mallorca, see Natalie Oeltjen, “A Converso Confraternity in Majorca: La Novella Confraria de Sant Miquel,” Jewish History 24 (2010): 53–85, at 54. 31. Rosh, Responsa, XIII:19. 32.  José Luis Lacave, “Documentos hebreos de Plasencia,” Sefarad 59 (1999): 309–17; and Abigail Agresta, “The Doctor and the Notary,” Viator 46 (2015): 229–48, at 238–39. 33.  Blasco Martínez, “Instituciones socioreligiosas judías de Zaragoza,” 9. On the impact of the Black Death on the Jews of Spain, see this volume, Chapter 5. 34.  Blasco Martínez, “Instituciones socioreligiosas judías de Zaragoza,” 9, 43–44. The bikor holim confraternity of Saragossa also had its own synagogue. 35.  Llil Baum, “Hebrew-­Catalan Medieval Wedding Songs: Satirical Functions of the Hebrew Component and Other Linguistic Aspects,” Journal of Jewish Languages 4 (2016): 166–202. 36. Adret, Responsa, II:286. For rabbinic attempts to control gambling in Spain, see Adret, Responsa, 2:35, 286; 7:244, 270, 445, 501; and Asher, Responsa, 11:10; 72:1; 82:2. In general, see Leo Landman, “Jewish Attitudes Toward Gambling: The Professional and Compulsive Gambler,” Jewish Quarterly Review 57 (1967): 298–318; and Leo Landman, “Jewish Attitudes Toward Gambling II: Individual and Communal Efforts to Curb Gambling,” Jewish Quarterly Review 58 (1967): 34–62. 37. Landman, “Jewish Attitudes Toward Gambling: The Professional and Compulsive Gambler,” 305. 38. Perfet, Responsa, nos. 281 and 432. 39.  Landman, “Jewish Attitudes Toward Gambling II,” 56. 40.  Montse Graells i Vilardosa, “Documents de la vida quotidiana dels jueus de Cervera (1352–1353),” Miscel.lània Cerverina 11 (1997): 183–98, no. 8. 41. For Jewish artisans in Aragon, see Motis Dolader, “Las comunidades judías en el Aragón medieval,” 36–42. For jobs for women, see Renée Levine Melammed, “The Jewish Woman in Medieval Iberia,” in The Jew in Medieval Iberia, ed. Jonathan Ray (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 257–85; and Sarah Ifft Ecker, “Credit and Connections: Jewish Women Between Communities in Vic, 1250–1350,” in Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, ed. Michelle Armstrong-­Padilla, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 17–40. 42.  Asunción Blasco Matínez, “Pintores y orfebres judíos en Zaragoza (siglo XIV),” Aragón en la edad media 8 (1989): 113–31, at 129. 43.  Miguel Angel Motis Dolader, Los judíos en Aragón en la Edad Media (siglos XIII–XV) (Zaragoza: Caja de Ahorros de la Inmaculada, 1990), 152–54; and Anna Rich, “Coral, Silk and Bones: Jewish Artisans and Merchants in Barcelona Between 1348 and 1391,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 53 (2009): 53–72. 44. Adret, Responsa, I:1158; II:120, 140, 163, 223, 229, 296, III:41; IV:230; and Perfet, Responsa, I:515. In some years there was enough kosher wine to create a surplus that was then sold to Christians, with royal permission. At other times, however, poor harvests forced Jews to import wine, especially to fulfill the needs of larger Jewish communities.

Notes to Pages 142–146

291

45.  Asunción Blasco Martínez, “La Casa de Fieras de la Aljafería de Zaragoza y los judíos,” in El poder real de la Corona de Aragón (siglos XIV–XVI) (Zaragoza: Gobierno de Aragón, 1996), Tomo 1, vol. 3, 291–318, at 302. 46.  Schadek, “Die Familiaren der aragonesischen Könige,” 114; and David Romano Ventura, “Mims, joglars, i ministers Jueus a la Corona d’Aragó (1352–1400),” in Studia in honorem Prof[essor] M. de Riquer 3, ed. Carlos Alvar (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1991), 133–50; and Albert I. Bagby, “The Figure of the Jew in the Cantigas of Alfonso X,” in Studies on the “Cantigas de Santa Maria”: Art, Music and Poetry, ed Israel J. Jatz and John Kelleher (Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1987), 235–46. 47.  María Gloria de Antonio Rubio, “Eran Ricos los judíos gallegos medievales?” Estudios de Historia de España 17 (2015): 131–50, at 141–42. 48.  Francisco García-­Serrano suggests that “by blaming the Jews for Christian vices, medieval society sought to absolve itself of inner feelings of guilt caused by the participation in activities of the profit economy.” Francisco García-­Serrano, Preachers of the City: The Expansion of the Dominican Order in Castile (1217–1348) (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1996), 18. More generally, see Giacomo Todeschini, “Christian Perceptions of Jewish Economic Activity in the Middle Ages,” in Wirtschaftsgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Juden: Fragen und Einschätzungen, ed. Elisabeth Müller-­Luckner and Michael Toch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 1–16. 49. Schraer, “Salamon Abnarrabi,” 99; and Mark D. Meyerson, A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-­Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 17–18. For the financial revolution of the fourteenth century in the Crown of Aragon, see Manual Sánchez Martínez, La deuda pública en la Cataluña bajomedieval (Madrid: CSIC, 2010), especially 7–20; Abella Samitier, “La deuda pública d los municipios aragoneses en los siglos XIV y XV,” Anuario de estudios medievales 29 (2009): 47–64; and Antoni Furió, “Crédito y endeudamiento: El censal en la sociedad rural valenciana (siglos XIV–XV),” in Señorio y feudalism en la Península Ibérica (ss. XII–XIX), vol. 1, ed. Eliseo Serrano Martín and Estevan Sarasa Sánchez (Zaragoza: Fernando el Católico, 1993), 501–34. 50.  Jews were also involved in loans to Muslims in rural Valencia, but here, too, larger loans were dominated by Christians. Juan Vicente García Marsilla, Vivir a crédito en la Valencia medieval (Valencia: Universidad de Valencia, 2002), 96–100; and Soler Milla, “Los judíos valenicanos,” 99–100. For Segorbe, see Perfet, Responsa, 282. 51.  Cited in Brann, Sáenz-­Badillos, and Targarona, “The Poetic Universe of Samuel Ibn Sasson,” 79. 52.  Gregory Milton, “Jews and Finance in Medieval Iberia,” in The Jew in Medieval Iberia, ed. Jonathan Ray (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 227–56, at 248–49. As Maya Soifer Irish has succinctly observed: “What was for Christian debtors the evidence of the Jews’ malice and greed was for the Jewish moneylenders an attempt to stay afloat in an atmosphere openly hostile to their interests.” Maya Soifer Irish, Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016), 243–44. 53.  Levine Melammed, “The Jewish Woman in Medieval Iberia,” 267; and Elka Beth Klein, “Splitting Heirs: Patterns of Inheritance Among Barcelona’s Jews,” Jewish History 16 (2002): 49–71, at 40 and 64. 54. Adret, Responsa, I:656, 924, and 930; Nissim Gerondi, Responsa, nos. 38 and 4, and generally Yom Tov Assis, “Maritime Trade with the East,” in The Jew in Medieval Iberia, ed. Jonathan Ray (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 180–226. For Mallorca, see Perfet, Responsa, I:377.

292

Notes to Pages 147–156

55.  Soler Milla, “Los judíos valenicanos,” 94; María Dolores López Pérez, La Corona de Aragón y el Magreb en el siglo XIV (1331–1410) (Barcelona: CSIC, 1995), 327; Máximo Diago Hernando, “La movilidad de los judíos a ambos lados de la frontera entre las Coronas de Castilla y Aragón durante el siglo XIV,” Sefarad 63 (2003): 237–82, at 266–70; and José Hinojosa Montalvo, “Actividades judías en la Valencia del siglo XIV,” En la España medieval 7 (1985): 1547–65, at 1558. 56.  Miguel Angel Motis Dolader, “Los corredores judíos en Aragón en la baja edad media,” Aragón en la edad media 7 (1985): 97–155, at 115–18. 57.  Assis, “Jewish Physicians and Medicine,” 44–45. 58.  Antonio Cardoner Planas, “Seis mujeres hebreas practicando la medicina en el Reino de Aragón,” Sefarad 9 (1949): 441–45. 59.  Yom Tov Assis, “Jewish Physician in Medieval Spain,” in Medicine and Medical Ethics in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, ed. Samuel Kottek and Luis G. Ballester (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996), 33–49, at 43. For families of Jews dedicated to the practice of medicine, see Hinojosa Montalvo, “Médicos judíos en la ciudad de Valencia,” 429–36. 60.  See the cases of Villalón and Zamora, respectively. Javier Castaño González, “Judíos y redes personales en Tierra de Campos durante la segunda mitad del siglo XV: Un cuaderno de minutas de avecindamientos de Villalón,” Sefarad 69 (2009): 361–82; and Ladero Quesada, “Apuntes para la historia de los judíos,” 31, n. 19. For Elche and Jérica, see Hinojosa Montalvo, “Médicos judíos en la ciudad de Valencia,” 417. 61.  Asunción Blasco Martínez, “Medicos y pacientes de las tres religiones (Zaragoza siglo XIC y comienzos del XV),” Aragón en la edad media 12 (1995): 153–82, at 174–77. 62.  Assis, “The Jewish Physician,” 40–41. 63.  Maud Kozodoy, “The Jewish Physician in Medieval Iberia (1100–1500),” in The Jew in Medieval Iberia, ed. Jonathan Ray (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 124. 64. Luis García-­ Ballester, Lola Ferre, and Eduard Feliu, “Jewish Appreciation of Fourteenth-­Century Scholastic Medicine,” Osiris 6 (1990): 85–117, at 110. 65. Ibid. 66.  Kozodoy, “The Jewish Physician,” 109–15. 67.  Judah Galinsky, “On Popular Halakhic Literature and the Jewish Reading Audience in Fourteenth-­Century Spain,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98 (2008): 305–27. 68.  Uriel Simon, “Interpreting the Interpreter: Supercommentaries on Ibn Ezra’s Commentaries,” in Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra: Studies in the Writings of a Twelfth-­Century Polymath, ed. Isadore Twersky and Jay M. Harris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies, 1993), 86–128; and Lawee, “A Genre Is Born.” 69.  The proliferation of commentaries was due in part to their widespread popular use during the six weeks between the holidays of Passover and Shavuot (Pentecost). Lawee, “A Genre Is Born,” 297 and 322; Carmi Horowitz, The Jewish Sermon, 22–35; and Yoel Marciano, “The Rise of Non-­Elitist Religious Literature in Late Medieval Spain and Its Reflection in Menorat ha-­Mor of Rabbi Isaac Aboab,” Sefarad 79 (2019): 411–45, at 424, n. 30. 70.  Menahem ibn Zerah, Tsedah La-­Derekh (Warsaw: Hayyim Kelter, 1880), chapter 37, p. 48; Seroussi, “Music in Medieval Ibero-­Jewish Society,” 35; and Rosh, Responsa, IV:19. 71. Rosh, Responsa, IV:22 72. Adret, Responsa, I: 300. 73. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 157–165

293

74. Perfet, Responsa, no. 37; and Adret, Responsa, 5:238. On the question of tefillin, see Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Rabbinic Attitudes Toward Non-­Observance in the Medieval Period,” in Jewish Tradition and the Non-­Traditional Jew, ed. Jacob Schacter (Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1990), 3–35. Tefillin are leather boxes containing parchments inscribed with biblical verses that are traditionally worn by Jews during daily worship services. 75. Perfet, Responsa, 253. On wearing jewelry on the Sabbath, see Nahmanides, Hiddushe Shabbat, ed. Moshe Hershler (Jerusalem: Makhon ha-­Talmud ha-­Israeli, 1973), 57a; and generally, Adret, Responsa, I:1189 and 1236. 76.  Seroussi, “Music in Medieval Ibero-­Jewish Society,” 35. On the sources and levels of religious literacy, see Galinsky, “On Popular Halakhic Literature,” 309; and Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Prayer, Literacy, and Literary Memory in Jewish Communities of Medieval Europe,” in Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition, ed. Ra’anan Boustan, Oren Kosansky, and Marina Rustow (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 250–70. For the rabbinate, see Adret, Responsa, 2:260; and Bernard Septimus, “Kings, Angels or Beggars: Tax Law and Spirituality in a Hispano-­Jewish Responsum,” in Studies in Medieval History and Literature, vol. 2, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 309–35. 77. Baer, Die Juden, vol. 1, p. 474. 78.  Israel Al-­Nakawa, Menorat ha-­ma’or, ed. H. G. Enelow (New York: Bloch, 1929), 2:357– 58. The Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur takes place on the tenth of the month of Tishrei, which follows Elul in the Hebrew calendar. The forty-­day period from Rosh Hodesh Elul to Yom Kippur is traditionally one of penitence. 79.  Lachter, “The Politics of Secrets,” 508. 80. Carmi Horowitz, “Darshanim, Derashot and the Derashah Literature in Medieval Spain,” in The Sephardi Legacy, 2 vols., ed. Haim Beinart (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992), vol. 1, 383–98, at 394. 81.  Ibid., 383–98; and Isaac Aboab, Menorat Ha-­Ma’or, ed. Yehuda Preis-­Horeb and Moshe Hayyim Katznellenbogen (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-­Rav Kook, 1961), 18. 82.  Al-­Nakawa, Menorat ha-­ma’or, 1:12. 83.  Galinsky, “On Popular Halakhic Literature,” 312. 84.  Cited in ibid., 319. 85.  Cited in Marciano, “Rise of Non-­Elitist Religious Literature,” 435. 86.  Ibid., 428. 87.  Cited in Galinsky, “On Popular Halakhic Literature,” 323, with some modifications. Another author of the period advertised his abridgment as being a “shining light” to “the forgetful and the feebleminded, the lazy, the busy, and the traveler.” Ibid., 324. 88.  Judah Galinsky and James Robinson, “Rabbi Jeruham b. Meshullam, Michael Scot, and the Development of Jewish Law in Fourteenth-­Century Spain,” Harvard Theological Review 100 (2007): 489–504, at 490. 89. Perfet, Responsa, 158 and 2:551, sec. 388; Baer, Die Juden, vol. 1, nos. 160, 162; and Adret, Responsa, VI: 7. 90.  Carmen Caballero-­Navas, “The Care of Women’s Health and Beauty: An Experience Shared by Medieval Jewish and Christian Women,” Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 146– 63, at 161–62. 91. Baer, Die Juden im christlichen Spanien, vol. 1, 578–79.

294

Notes to Pages 166–174

92.  Carmen Caballeros-­Navas, The Book of Women’s Love (London: Kegan Paul, 2004). 93. Adret, Responsa, I:413; and Gideon Bohak, “Jewish Magic in the Middle Ages,” in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. David J. Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 269–99. On the talisman for the Black Death, see Anna Colet Marc, Jordi Ruiz, Oriol Saula, and M. Eulàlia Subirà, “Les fosses communes de la necròpolis medieval jueva de les Roquetes, Tàrrega,” Urtx 23 (2009): 105–23, at 114. 94.  José Hinojosa Montalvo, “Brujería y Satanismo entre los judíos valencianos,” in Castilla y el Mundo Feudal: Homenaje al Profesor Julio Valdeón, ed. María Isabel del Val Valdivieso and Pascual Martínez Sopena (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2009), 256 . The use of magic phrases, amulets, and notions of astral magic in medieval culture was by no means unique to Judaism or to Spain. See Medieval Christianity, ed. Daniel Bornstein (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 194–99. On Jewish borrowing from Christian magical spells and practices, see Bohak, “Jewish Magic in the Middle Ages,” 283–84.

Chapter 5 1.  The Rindfleisch and Armleder massacres affected well over a hundred communities throughout central Europe over the course of the early to mid-­fourteenth century. They were followed by widespread violence against the Jews during the Black Death. 2.  Yom Tov Assis, “Juifs de France réfugiés en Aragon (xiii e–xiv siècles),” Revue des Éstudes juives 142 (1983): 285–322, at 304. 3.  The literature here is extensive. In general, see R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Niren­ berg, Communities of Violence; David Nirenberg, Anti-­Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 4.  García-­Ballester, Ferre, and Feliu, “Jewish Appreciation of Fourteenth-­Century Scholastic Medicine,” 102. 5.  Estori ha-­Parhi, Sefer kaftor va-­ferah, ed. Abraham Moses Luncz (Jerusalem, 1897), 3. 6. Meyerson, Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 96. On the Pastoureaux see Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, chapter 3; and Susan Einbinder, “Anti-­Jewish Violence and the Pastoureaux: The Case for Medieval Trauma,” in Trauma in Medieval Society, ed. Wendy J. Turner and Christina Lee (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 151–79. 7. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 108–10. 8. Baer, History, vol. 2, 9–14. 9.  José Goñi Gaztambide, “La matanza de judíos en Navarra, en 1328,” Hispania Sacra 12 (1959): 5–33; and Nadia Marin, “La matanza de 1328, témoin des soldiarités de la Navarre chrétienne,” Príncipe de Viana 59 (1998): 147–69. 10.  A Jewish reference to martyrdom that was standard for accounts of loved ones killed in such attacks. 11.  Menahem ibn Zerah, Tsedah La-­Derekh, 7. The numbers quoted here (6000 total dead, and 25 assailants of Ibn Zerah) should not be taken literally. 12. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 69–91.

Notes to Pages 175–184

295

13.  José María Millás Vallicrosa and Luis Bratlle Prats, “Un alboroto contra el Call de Gerona en el año 1331,” Sefarad 12 (1952): 197–335; and Smith, “‘You Will Receive So Many Stab Wounds Here.’” 14.  Thomas Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 109; and Meyerson, Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 212–23. 15.  On the Jews of Spain and the Black Death, see Susan Einbinder, After the Black Death: Plague and Commemoration Among Iberian Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 16.  Juan F. Utrilla Utrilla, “La población de Calatayud y su comunidad de aldeas ante la crisis demográfica del siglo XIV (1350–1414),” in La población de Aragón en la edad media (siglos XIII–XV): Estudios de demografía histórica, ed. José Ángel Sesma Muñoz and Carlos Laliena Corbera (Zaragoza: Leyere, 2004), 403–70, at 451. 17.  Horowitz, “Darshanim, Derashot and the Derashah Literature,” 395. 18.  Amada López de Meneses, “Una consecuencia de la peste negra en Cataluña: El pogrom de 1348,” Sefarad 19 (1959): 92–131, at 110, 115–16. The broader context in which nearly everyone outside one’s own small group could be classified as an enemy and “traitor” must be taken into consideration here. For the use of the same cry against Christians, see Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 238, n. 27. 19. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 236; and Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 222–23. On well-­ poisoning accusations against Jews in medieval Europe, see Tzafrir Barzilay, “Early Accusations of Well Poisoning Against Jews: Medieval Reality or Historiographical Fiction?” Medieval Encounters 22 (2016): 517–39. 20.  Álvaro Santamaría Arández, “La peste negra en Mallorca,” in VIII Congreso de historia de la Corona de Aragón, sec. II, vol. I (Valencia: Caja de Ahorros, 1969), 103–30, at 114 and 129; and Amada López de Meneses, “Documentos acerca de la peste negra en los dominios de la corona de Aragón,” Estudios de Edad Media de la Corona de Aragón 6 (1956): 291–447, appendix, no. 22. 21.  López de Meneses, “Documentos,” no. 9. 22.  López de Meneses, “Documentos,” no. 123; and López de Meneses, “Una consecuencia,” appendices 15 and 16. 23.  López de Meneses, “Una consecuencia,” appendices 12 and 17. 24.  Cayetano Rosell, Crónica de Fernando el Cuarto, 164, and Crónica de Alfonso Onceno, 196, in Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla (Madrid: Altas, 1953). 25. Baer, Die Juden, I, no. 243. 26.  Cited in Ron Barkai, “Jewish Treatises on the Black Death (1350–1500): A Preliminary Study,” in Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, ed. R. French, J. Arrizabalaga, A. Cunningham, and L. García Ballester (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 6–25, at 10. 27.  López de Meneses, “Una consecuencia,” appendix 12. 28. Baer, Die Juden, vol. 1, no. 143. 29.  Jaume Riera i Sans, “Guia per a una lectura comprensiva dels acords,” Calls 2 (1987): 154–73, at 166. 30.  Translated in Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-­Government in the Middle Ages (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1924), 337. See also Eduard Feliu, “Els Acords De Barcelona de 1354,” Calls 2 (1987): 145–64.

296

Notes to Pages 185–197

31. Finkelstein, Jewish Self-­Government, 337. 32. Baer, Die Juden, 437–41. 33. Baer, History, 2: 69. 34.  Pero López de Ayala, “Crónica del rey don Pedro,” in Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla, ed. Cayetano Rosell (Madrid: Atlas, 1953), 462 and 510; and León Tello, Judíos de Toledo, 2: 140–44. 35.  Samuel ibn Zarza, Mekor Hayyim, cited in Baer, Die Juden, 200–201. For Nájera, see López de Ayala, “Crónica del rey don Pedro,” 503. For the English troops fighting with Pedro and their attacks on the Jews, see Antonio Benavides, Memorias de D. Fernando IV de Castilla (Madrid: J. Rodriguez, 1860), 787; and Julio Valdeón Baruque, Los judíos de Castilla y la revolución Trastámara (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1968), 47–48. 36.  Carlos del Valle Rodríguez, “Fuentes hebreas de la historia de España (II): Los relatos de Menahem ben Zerah (1308–1385),” Boletín de la Asociación Española de Orientalistas 40 (2004): 65–76, at 75. 37.  León Tello, Judíos de Toledo, 2:156; Teófilo López Mata, “Morería y judería,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Historia 129 (1951): 335–84 at 370; Pilar León Tello, Los judíos de Palencia, Publicaciones de la Institución Tello Téllez de Meneses 25 (1967): 1-­169, at 49–51. 38.  Diago Hernando, “La movilidad,” 272–73. 39.  Javier Castaño González, “Nuevos documentos hebraico-­aljamiados de Aragón (1), Fragmentos de un registro de la aljama de Tarazona,” Sefarad 64 (2004): 315–40, at 321. 40.  Soifer Irish, Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile, 221–61. 41.  Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 295, 299. 42.  Manuel Sánchez Martínez, “La fiscalidad real en Cataluña (siglo XIV),” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 22 (1992): 341–476; and Angus MacKay, Money, Prices, and Politics in Fifteenth-­Century Castile (London: Royal Historical Society, 1981), 94. 43.  López de Meneses, “Una consecuencia,” no. 14. 44.  Samuel Ravaya came to settle in Valencia from Seville and was asked to promise that he would stay and contribute to local taxes for at least two years. Blasco Martínez, “Instituciones sociorreligiosas judías de Zaragoza,” 62. 45. Baer, Die Juden, vol. 1, no. 253; and Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews, 405.

Chapter 6 1.  Paola Tartakoff, Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250–1391 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 154, n. 4. For rabbinic accounts of conversos who become antagonists to the Jews, see Adret, Responsa, I:1091; III:352. 2.  Robin Vose, Dominicans, Muslims, and Jews in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 3.  Oriol Catalan, “Anti-­Jewish Preaching as Part of an Anti-­Jewish Narrative,” in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Preaching in the Mediterranean and Europe: Identities and Interfaith Encounters, ed. Linda G. Jones and Andrew Dupont-­Hamy (Turnhout: Brepolis, 2019), 123–36, at 130–31. Conversos might well have chosen to engage their former coreligionists in debate to prove themselves to their new cohort. But we must also consider that such interfaith polemics were also a natural continuation of intra-­faith disputes that had become standard among Jewish scholars. 4.  Benjamin R. Gampel, Anti-­Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391–1392 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 140.

Notes to Pages 198–213

297

5.  Cited in Soifer Irish, Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile, 229. 6. Baer, Die Juden, vol. 2, no. 221. 7.  Henry Charles Lea, “Acta Capitular del Cabildo de Sevilla,” American Historical Review 1 (1896): 220–25, at 224. 8.  Jesús López Román, “La judería de Úbeda durante los siglos XIII y XIV,” Boletín del Instituto de Estudios Giennenses 215 (2017): 149–78, at 171. 9.  Lea, “Acta Capitular del Cabildo,” 224. On Martínez and the riots in Castile, see Gampel, Anti-­Jewish Riots, 15–17. 10. Gampel, Anti-­Jewish Riots, 18–23. 11.  Cited in Meyerson, Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 272. 12.  For events in the Kingdom of Valencia, see Gampel, Anti-­Jewish Riots, 29–31, 60, 63–65. In Valencia and elsewhere, Christian mobs fell upon local Muslim communities as well. 13. Gampel, Anti-­Jewish Riots, 86–88. 14.  Jean Froissart, The Ancient Chronicles of Sir Jean Froissart of England, France, Spain, Portugal, Scotland, Brittany, and Flanders and the Adjoining Countries, vol. 3, ed. John Bourchier (London: W. M. Dowall, 1815), 372. For Montalbán, see Ram Ben Shalom, “Conflict Between Jews and Converts in Aragon Following the Persecutions of 1391,” Sefarad 73 (2013): 97–131, at 101. 15. Gampel, Anti-­Jewish Riots, 136, 159, 161, 146–47, and 153. 16.  Ibid., 159 and 180. 17. Perfet, Responsa nos. 6–7. For Girona, see Jews in the Crown of Aragon: Regesta of the Cartas Reales in the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, vol. 2, ed. Gemma Escribà and Raquel Ibañez-­Sperber (Jerusalem: Henk Schussheim Memorial Series, 1995), 291. 18.  Jaume Riera i Sans, “El baptisme de Rabí Ishaq ben Seset Perfet,” Calls 1 (1986): 43–52. 19. Baer, History, vol. 2, 126–30; and Baer, Die Juden, I: 467. 20. Baer, History, vol. 2, 110–30; and Ram Ben Shalom, “Hasdai Crescas: Portrait of Leader at a Time of Crisis,” in The Jew in Medieval Iberia, ed. Jonathan Ray, 309–51. 21. Meyerson, 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, vol. 2, 245–423. 22.  David Nirenberg, “Enmity and Assimilation: Jews, Christians, and Converts in Medieval Spain,” Common Knowledge 9 (2003): 137–55, at 143; and Ram Ben Shalom, “Between Official and Private Dispute: The Case of Christian Spain and Provence in the Late Middle Ages,” AJS Review 27 (2003): 23–72, at 39. 23. Perfet, Responsa, 43. 24.  Hinojosa Montalvo, Jews of the Kingdom of Valencia, From Perscution to Expulsion: 1391-­1492 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), doc. 82, 364–65. See also Joseph Hacker, “Links Between Spanish Jewry and Palestine,” in Vision and Conflict in the Holy Land, 1391–1492, ed. Richard I. Cohen (New York, 1985), 111–39; and Benzion Dinur, “A Wave of Emigration from Spain to the Land of Israel After the Persecutions of 1391” [in Hebrew], Zion 32 (1967): 161–74. 25.  Leo Landau, Das apologetische Schreiben des Josua Lorki an den Abtrünnigen Don Salomon ha-­Lewi (Paulus de Santa Maria) (Antwerp: Teitelbaum & Boxenbaum, 1906). The English translation here is taken from Benjamin R. Gampel, “A Letter to a Wayward Teacher: The Transformations of Sephardic Culture in Christian Iberia,” in Cultures of the Jews, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken, 2002), 389–447. 26. Ibid.

298

Notes to Pages 214–223

27.  Carlos del Valle Rodríguez, Obras Completas de Jerónimo de Santa Fe: I Errores y falsedades del Talmud (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Humanisticos, 2006); and Moises Orfali, El Tratado “De Iudaicis erroribus ex Talmut” de Jerónimo de Santa Fe (Madrid: Editorial CSIC, Instituto de Filología, 1987). 28. Baer, Die Juden, vol. 1, no. 481. 29.  Hyam Maccoby, Judaism on Trial: Jewish-­Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Littman Library, 1984), 84. 30.  Miguel Ángel Motis Dolader, “The Socio-­Economic Structure of the Jewish Aljamas in the Kingdom of Aragon (1391–1492),” in The Jews of Spain and the Expulsion of 1492, ed. Moshe Lazar and Stephen Haliczer (Lancaster, CA: Labyrinthos, 1997), 65–128, at 65–66. 31.  Simon ben Semah Duran, Sefer ha-­Tashbets (Responsa) (Amsterdam: Naphtali Hirts Levi, 1741), III: 227; and Perfet, Responsa, nos. 11 and 4. 32.  Maud Kozodoy, The Secret Faith of Maestre Honoratus: Profayt Duran and Jewish Identity in Late Medieval Iberia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 22. 33.  TB, Sanhedrin, 44a. For other legal categories for converts, such as mumarim and meshummadim, see TB Sanhedrin 74a–b, and Perfet, Responsa, nos. 4, 11. 34.  Benzion Netanyahu asserted that the responsa literature shows a gradual evolution in Jewish attitudes from seeing conversos as anusim to seeing them as meshummadim (apostates), and in some cases, as fully non-­Jewish. Benzion Netanyahu, The Marranos of Spain: From the Late XIVth to the Early XVIth Century According to Hebrew Sources (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1966), 75–66. Dora Zsom has recently rejected this argument, noting that these attitudes existed simultaneously rather than diachronically. Dora Zsom, Conversos in the Responsa of Sephardic Halakhic Authorities of the 15th Century (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2014), 13. 35.  Sefer ha-­Rashbash: She’elot u-­Teshuvot, no. 553, and Zsom, Conversos in the Responsa, 167. 36.  Sefer ha-­Rashbash: She’elot u-­Teshuvot, no. 553. 37.  Benjamin Ze‘ev ben Mattathias, Sefer Binyamin Ze‘ev, ed. Meir Benayahu (Jerusalem: Yad ha-­Rav Nisim, 1988), no.70. 38. Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Returning to the Jewish Community in Medieval Ashkenaz: History and Halakhah,” in Turim: Studies in Jewish History and Literature Presented to Dr. Bernard Lander, ed. Michael A. Shmidman (New York: Touro College Press, 2007), 69–97, at 75. 39. Adret, Responsa, vol. 7, no. 411 (cf. also vol. 5, no. 66). Here Ibn Adret gives a restatement of the classical position found in geonic literature. See the responsum of Amram Gaon in Otsar Ha-­Geonim, ed. Benjamin M. Lewin (Jerusalem, 1936), 7, 112–13. 40.  Solomon ben Simeon Duran, Sefer ha-­Rashbash: She’elot u-­Teshuvot (Jerusalem: Mekhon Or ha-­Mizrah, 1998), no. 89. 41.  The potential problems in this regard that were posed by outsiders seeking to enter the community via conversion were exemplified by two Talmudic maxims that were well known to medieval rabbis: “Converts are difficult for Israel” (or, “more difficult than a sore”) and “the Divine presence rests only with families of pure lineage.” TB, Niddah 13b, Yevamot, 47b, 109b, and Kiddushin, 71a. 42.  Semah ben Solomon Duran, Yakhin u-­Voaz: II: 3. In his use of the term ‘am ba’alei teshuvah, the younger Duran seems to pull back from the harsh position assumed by his father, Tashbets. He upholds the notion that the conversos were anusim, citing Mishna Nedarim 3:11, chapter Ha-­Noder, 31b, and arguing that a Jew, even if uncircumcised, is still a Jew.

Notes to Pages 226–232

299

Chapter 7 1.  Juan Carlos Martín Cea, “Los judíos de Paredes de Nava: La desaparición de una aljama palentina en 1412,” in Actas del I Congreso de Historia de Palencia (Valladolid: Diputación Provincial de Palencia, 1987), 539–52. 2.  Javier Castaño González, “Las aljamas de Castilla a mediados del siglo XV: La Carta Real de 1450,” En la España Medieval 18 (1995), 181–203, at 191. 3.  Ibid., 190, n. 40. 4.  López Román, “La judería de Úbeda.” 5.  Serafín de Tapia, “Judíos de Ávila en vísperas de la expulsión,” Sefarad 57 (1997): 135–78, at 141. Still, by the late fifteenth century, conversos outnumbered Jews in most cities. 6.  Ladero Quesada, “Apuntes para la historia de los judíos y conversos de Zamora,” 35, 39, and 46. 7.  Miguel Angel Motis Dolader, “Estructura interna y ordenamiento jurídico de las aljamas judías del Valle del Ebro,” in II Semana de Estudios Medievales (Nájera: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 1992), 111–53, at 112. 8. Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 76–83. 9.  Motis Dolader, “Estructura Interna,” 113; and Miguel Angel Motis Doalder, “Población, urbanismo y estructura política de las aljamas judías de Aragón en el siglo XV,” Hispania 56 (1996): 885–944, at 902 and 904. 10.  Jaume Riera i Sans, “Judíos y Conversos en los reinos de la Corona de Aragón durante el siglo XV,” in La expulsión de los judíos de España (Toledo: Caja de Castilla La-­Mancha, 1993), 71–90, at 76. 11.  José Hinojosa Montalvo, Jews of the Kingdom of Valencia, From Perscution to Expulsion: 1391-­1492 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), 202–3. 12. Baer, Die Juden, I: 852–55. 13. Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 66–69. 14.  Ibid., 73, 78; and Riera i Sans, “Judios y Conversos en los reinos de la Corona de Aragon durante el siglo XV,” 78. Riera i Sans argues that the crown’s disinterest in overtaxing the Jews was because there was little left to tax in the few impoverished communities that still existed in the Crown of Aragon. While that may be true, the kings and queens of the fifteenth century also displayed a clear interest in trying to rebuild the Jewish community as best they could, with their own benefit in mind. 15. Eugenio Benedicto Gracia, “Documentos acerca del sistema de insaculación en la aljama judía de Huesca (siglo XV),” Sefarad 66 (2006): 309–44; and Miguel Angel Motis Dolader, “Profile of the Mercantile Oligarchy in the Mid-­Range Jewish Communities in the Kingdom of Aragon: The Avincazez Family from Barbastro (Huesca) in the 14th and 15th Centuries,” Imago Temporis. Medium Aevum 12 (2018): 317–36. 16. Eleazar Gutwirth, “Social Criticism in Bonafed’s Invective and Its Historical Background,” Sefarad 45 (1985): 23–53. 17. Baer, Die Juden, I, 839. 18.  Hinojosa Montalvo, The Jews of the Kingdom of Valencia, 218. 19.  María Cristina Redondo Jarillo, “Delincuencia civil y criminal en las comunidades judías entre el Duero y el Tajo a fines de la Edad Media,” Clio & Crimen 7 (2010): 244–342, at 301. 20. Baer, Die Juden, 349–50.

300

Notes to Pages 232–242

21.  Ibid., 865–69. 22.  Enrique Cantera Montenegro, “La justicia en las aljamas castellanas a fines del siglo XV: La frontera oriental del reino de Castilla,” Sefarad 52 (1992): 337–53. 23. Baer, Die Juden, no. 547. 24.  Asunción Blasco Martínez, “La Contratación de rabí Jucé ben Josuá como ‘Rav’ o Marbiztora de la Aljama de Zaragoza (1454),” Sefarad 67 (2007): 71–109, at 74, n. 9. 25.  Angus Mackay, “Popular Movements and Pogroms in Fifteenth-­Century Castile,” Past and Present 55 (1972): 33–67, at 41–44; and Cantera Montenegro, “Algunas notas sobre Abraham Bienveniste, Rab Mayor de los judíos y tesorero real en tiempos de Juan II de Castilla,” Espacio, Tiempo, y Forma 27 (2014): 161–92, at 163. 26.  English translation from Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-­Government in the Middle Ages (New York: JTS, 1964), 355. 27.  Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 156–64. 28.  Macarena Crespo Álvarez, “El Cargo de Rab Mayor de la Corte según un document de Juan II fechado en 1450,” Edad Media, Revista de Historia 4 (2001): 157–98, at 171–74; and Javier Castaño González, “Social Networks in a Castilian Jewish Aljama and the Court Jews in the Fifteenth Century: A Preliminary Survey (Madrid 1440–1475),” En la España Medieval 20 (1997): 379–92, at 383. Here the post is listed as juez mayor de las aljamas. 29.  Tapia, “Judíos de Ávila,” 149–50. 30.  Cea Gutierrez, “La Comunidad judía en la sierra de francia (Salamanca),” 156. For an example of the leading role that the local municipality could play in overseeing Jewish affairs, see the example of the town of Villalón, in the Tierra de Campos region of Castile. Castaño González, “Judíos y redes personales.” 31.  Tapia, “Judíos de Ávila”; Castaño González, “Judíos y redes personales en Tierra de Campos durante la segunda mitad del siglo XV: Un cuaderno de minutas de avecindamientos de Villalón,” Sefarad 69 (2009): 361-­382, at 372; Blasco Martínez, “Instituciones sociorreligiosas judías de Zaragoza,” 286–67. 32.  Bonofacio Bartalomé Herrero, “Una donación entre judíos Segovianos, originalmente en hebreo, del año 1487,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma 20 (2007): 13–27, at 21. 33.  Hinojosa Montalvo, The Jews of the Kingdom of Valencia, 204–5, and 218; María López Diez, “Judíos y mudéjares en la Catedral de Segovia (1458–1502),” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma 18 (2005): 169–84, at 174–77; and Cea Gutierrez, “La Comunidad judía en la sierra de francia (Salamanca),” 155 and 162. 34.  Antonio Rubio, “Eran ricos los judíos Gallegos medievales?” 140. 35.  Riera i Sans, “Judíos y Conversos en los reinos de la Corona de Aragón durante el siglo XV,” 77. 36.  Castaño González, “Judíos y redes personales,” 365; Ladero Quesada, “Apuntes,” 31, n. 19; Castaño González, “Social Networks in a Castilian Jewish Aljama,” 385; and Tapia, “Judíos de Ávila,” 148–50. 37.  See the letter of Ferdinand and Isabella to all officials in Castile reaffirming the right of Jews to travel freely on Sundays and Christian holidays (c. 1482), published in Luis Suárez Fernández, Documentos acerca de la expulsión de los Judíos (Valladolid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1964), 261–63. 38.  José Hinojosa Montalvo, “Judíos extranjeros en el reino de Valencia durante la Baja Edad Media,” Sefarad 70 (2010): 69–115, at 70.

Notes to Pages 242–248

301

39.  For a summary of the intellectual trends during this period, see Eric Lawee, “Sephardic Intellectuals: Challenges and Creativity (1391–1492),” in The Jew in Medieval Iberia, ed. Jonathan Ray (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 352–94; and Yoel Marciano, Sages of Spain in the Eye of the Storm: Jewish Scholars in Late Medieval Spain [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Bialik, 2019). 40.  Mauro Zonta, “Arabic and Latin Glosses in Medieval Hebrew Translations of Philosophical Texts and Their Relation to Hebrew Philosophical Dictionaries,” in Lexiques bilingues dans les domaines philosophiques et scientifique, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse and Danielle Jacquart (Turnhout: Brepolis, 2001), 31–48, at 47. 41.  Hava Tirosh-­Rothschild, “On the Eve of Modernity,” in History of Jewish Philosophy, ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (New York: Routledge, 1997), 509–11. 42.  Michael Riegler, “Were the Yeshivot in Spain Centers for Copying Books?” Sefarad 57 (1997): 373–98, at 387; and Joseph R. Hacker, “Jewish Book Owners and Their Libraries in the Iberian Peninsula,” in The Late Medieval Hebrew Book in the Western Mediterranean, ed. Javier del Barco (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 70–104. 43.  Suárez Fernández estimated it at 300 families in 1492. Suárez Fernández, Documentos, 56. 44. Eric Lawee, Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 110–15. On fifteenth-­ century Spanish exegetes in general, see Israel Ta-­Shma, “Li-­yedi’at masav limud ha-­torah bi-­ sefarad ba-­me’ah ha-­15,” in Dor Gerush Sefarad: Koves ma’amarim, ed. Yom Tov Assis and Yosef Kaplan (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 1999), 47–62. 45. On Arragel, see Sonia Fellous, “Cultural Hybridity, Cultural Subversion: Text and Image in the Alba Bible, 1422–33,” Exemplaria 12 (2000): 205–29; and Luis Manuel Girón-­ Negrón and Andrés Enrique-­Arias, “La Biblia de Arragel y la edición de traducciones bíblicas del siglo XV,” Helmántica 63 (2012): 291–309. On Jewish bible illumination during this period, see Katrin Kogman-­Appel, Jewish Book Art Between Islam and Christianity: The Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Medieval Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 203–319. 46.  Blasco Martínez, “La Contratación de rabí Jucé ben Josuá,” 84. The Haftarah is a selection from the books of the Prophets that is paired with the weekly Torah portion. 47.  Cited in Marc Saperstein, Jewish Preaching, 1200–1800: An Anthology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 393. 48.  Seroussi, “Music in Medieval Ibero-­Jewish Society,” 26. 49.  Hayyim Schirmann, “Solomon Bonafed’s Polemic Against the Nobles of Saragossa” [Hebrew], Qovets ‘Al Yad [n.s.] 4 (1946): 11–64; and Gutwirth, “Social Criticism in Bonafed’s Invective.” Duran distinguished among poets, talmudists, and kabbalists as the three basic groups of Jewish intellectuals. Profayt Duran, Ma‘aseh Efod (Vienna: Holtzwarth, 1865), 8–15. 50.  On the revival of “Spanish” national pride in the fifteenth century and its influence on Jews, see Ram Ben Shalom, “Myths of Troy and Hercules as Reflected in the Writings of Some Jewish Exiles from Spain,” in Jews, Muslims and Christians in and around the Crown of Aragon, ed. Harvey J. Hames (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 229–54; Eleazar Gutwirth, “El gobernador judío ideal, acerca de un sermón inédito de Yosef ibn Shem Tob,” Congreso Internacional “Encuentro de las 3 Culturas,” 3 (1988): 67–75; and David Nirenberg, “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-­Century Spain,” Past and Present 174 (2002): 3–41. 51.  Andrés Bernáldez, Memorias del reinado de los Reyes Católicos, ed. Manuel Gómez-­ Moreno and Juan de Mata Carriazo (Madrid: n.p., 1962), ch. 43.

302

Notes to Pages 249–264

52.  See the English translation by Edward Peters published in Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources, ed. Olivia Remie Constable (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 352–56. 53.  Motis Dolader, “La comunidad judía y conversa de Daroca (Zaragoza) en el siglo XV: Refundación, vita cotidiana y círculos de sociabilidad,” Hispania 76 (2016): 617–43; and John Edwards, “Jewish Testimony to the Spanish Inquisition: Teruel 1484–1487,” Revue des études juives 143 (1984): 333–50, at 347. 54.  Stephen Haliczer, Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478–1834 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 218; and Edwards, “Jewish Testimony to the Spanish Inquisition,” 335–37. 55.  Eleazar Gutwirth, “Abraham Seneor: Social Tensions and the Court Jew,” Michael 11 (1989): 169–229. For Valencia, see José Hinojosa Montalvo, “Judíos extranjeros en el reino de Valencia,” 80–81. 56.  On high-­profile conversos in the church during the fifteenth century, see Mackay, “Popular Movements and Pogroms,” 48–49. 57.  Cit. in Eloy Benito Ruano, Toledo en el siglo XV (Madrid: CSIC, 1961), 186. 58.  Ibid., 188. 59.  Vicente Beltrán de Heredia, “Las bulas de Nicolás V acerca de los conversos de Castilla,” Sefarad 21 (1961): 22–47, at 37–38. 60.  John Edwards, “Origins of the Inquisition in Andalusia,” Meridies 4 (1997): 83–115, at 93. 61.  María Antonia Antoranz Onrubia, “Noticias y tradiciones en torno al ‘crimen ritual’ de Sepúlveda,” Sefarad 67 (2007): 69–75; and Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York: Random House, 1995), 732–43. 62. Baer, Die Juden, I, 887. 63.  Suárez Fernández, Documentos, 133, 140. 64.  Haim Beinart, “The Expulsion from Spain: Causes and Results,” in The Sephardi Legacy, 11–41, at 15. 65.  Rubio, “Eran ricos los judíos?” 147. 66.  Stephen H. Haliczer, “The Castilian Urban Patriciate and the Expulsions of 1480–1492,” American Historical Review 78 (1973): 35–62, at 54–55. 67.  Lu Ann Homza, The Spanish Inquisition, 1478–1614: An Anthology of Sources (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006), xvi. 68.  William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8. Auto-­da-­fé or auto de la fe (“act of faith”) is the general term used to describe the ceremony of public penance and, in its most notorious form, execution of accused heretics. 69.  Beinart, “The Expulsion from Spain,” 24. 70.  Suárez Fernández, Documentos, 363–67. 71.  Mark D. Meyerson, “Aragonese and Catalan Converts at the Time of the Expulsion,” Jewish History 6 (1992): 31–149, at 135; and Cea Gutierrez, “La Comunidad judía en la sierra de francia (Salamanca),” 162. For the hardships encountered by the exiles of 1492 in Portugal and North Africa, see Jonathan Ray, After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardi Jewry (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 33–56. For Navarre, see Benjamin R. Gampel, The Last Jews on Iberian Soil: Navarrese Jewry 1479/1498 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

Notes to Page 268

303

Epilogue 1.  Haim Beinart, “Vuelta de judíos a España después de la expulsion,” in Judíos, Sefarditas, Conversos: La expulsión de 1492 y sus consequencias, ed. Angel Alcalá (Valladolid: Ámbito Ediciones, 1995), 181–94. On the return of Jewish exiles, see also Ray, After Expulsion, 50–55. 2.  Meyerson, “Aragonese and Catalan Converts at the Time of the Expulsion,” 134. 3.  Cea Gutierrez, “La Comunidad judía en la sierra de francia (Salamanca),” 156–59. 4.  Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, “Judíos en el Mundo rural castellano a fines de la Edad Media,” in Castilla y el mundo feudal: Homenaje al professor Julio Valdeón, ed. María Isabel del Val Valdivieso and Pascual Martínez Sopena (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2009), 293– 303, at 298. For a similar case in Zamora, see Ladero Quesada, “Apuntes,” 45, n. 62.

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INDEX

Aaron ben Meshullam, 88 Abbasid Caliphate, 15, 20, 275n10 ‘Abd al-Mu’min, 59, 62 ‘Abd al-Rahman III, 14–16 Abenaçay, Abraham, 241 Abnarrabi, Salamon, 135–36 Abnarrabi, Samuel, 135 Abner of Burgos, 100 Aboab, Isaac, 162–63 Aboab, Isaac, II, 244–45 Abraham bar Hiyya, 78, 84 Abravanel, Isaac, 245 Abudraham, David ben Joseph, 163–64 Abu Ishaq, 32–33, 57, 277n44 Abulafia, Abraham, 101, 285n27 Abulafia, Meir, 45, 103 Abulafia, Todros, 78, 94 Açamahas, Yuçef, 238 Adret, Perfet, 183 Agay, Jacob, 267 Agay family, 234 Agi, Abraham, 232 Agi, Samuel, 232 Alami, Solomon, 243 al-­Andalus (Muslim Spain): anti-­Jewish measures in, 6, 57–66; Arabic language and, 14; biblical exegesis in, 35–36; Christian expansion in, 56–57, 62, 70–75; Christian minority in, 31, 58; collapse of Jewish life in, 55–64; genealogical claims in, 48–49; Jewish communal organization in, 19–22; Jewish communities in, 19–20, 275n17; Jewish exile from, 55, 60, 62, 64; Jewish life in, 1–2, 7, 11–13, 273n1; Jewish literary production in, 3; Jewish movement to, 13, 17, 22, 275n13; Jewish-­Muslim relations in, 27–35, 54; Jewish social subjugation in, 29–34; Jews as protected minority in, 6, 8–9, 28–29, 57, 168; Judaism in, 37–47; Muslim rivalries in, 20; nationalism and,

53; rabbinic academies in, 44; taifas in, 22, 31, 56–57, 66, 78; trade in, 25–26. See also Andalusi Jews Alatzar, Jafuda, 184, 186 Alazar, Mossé, 149 Alba Bible, 245 Albarracín, 260 Albo, Joseph, 214, 242–43 Alcalá de Henares, 132 alcaldes apartados, 111 Alconstantini, Salamon, 120–21 Alexander II, Pope, 70, 74 Alfajar, Çulema, 132 Alfasi, Isaac, 19, 38, 42, 45, 97, 279n76 Alfonso de Valladolid (Abner of Burgos), 100 Alfonso I, 58, 74 Alfonso II, 71 Alfonso III, 121 Alfonso V, 216, 229–31, 264 Alfonso VI, 56, 66–67, 69–70 Alfonso VII, 65, 283n38 Alfonso VIII, 70 Alfonso X, 96, 112–18, 121, 123–24 Alfonso XI, 131, 145, 187 Alharizi, Judah, 34, 36–39, 50, 78 aljamas: appeals for royal support, 105–6; association with royal agents, 111; Christian notaries and, 107–8; collectas (tax groupings), 127–28, 191, 227; competition with concejos, 111–12, 125, 191; courtiers and, 131–32, 233; cultural and social differences in, 126–27; economic prominence of, 227; factionalism and, 232; financial viability and, 106, 192–93; francos (tax-­exempt), 133–34, 184, 288n14, 289n17; impact of juderías on, 257–58; independence of, 104–5; intracommunal relations in, 126–27, 129–37, 141, 231; Jewish affairs in, 300n30; Jewish elites and, 120–21; Jewish scholars in, 244; medical profession in, 241; mobility

326

Index

aljamas (continued) of settlements, 106–7, 238–39; payment of protection money, 191; political instability and, 231; rab de la corte position and, 235; religious life and, 246; rise of Jewish oligarchies in, 104–5, 121; royal intervention in, 233, 238; satellite communities around, 127–28; self-­government and, 183–86, 231–32; social divisions in, 134–36, 139, 231, 238–39; takkanot organization in, 184–85; tax collection and, 183, 263; tensions between, 125. See also communal politics; kahal (communal councils) Almali, Judah, 142 al-­Mansur, 18 Almelich, Baron, 148 Almería, 25–26 Almohad dynasty: abolition of dhimmi status, 59–60; anti-­Jewish measures in, 6, 56, 59, 62, 169, 278n52; Arabized Jews and, 80; forced conversions and, 59–61, 196; Jewish communal authority under, 64–65; Jewish courtiers and, 81; Jewish physicians and, 59; militarism and, 281n2; monotheism and, 59; unification of Muslim Spain, 56, 69 Almoravid dynasty: anti-­Jewish measures in, 6, 57–59, 62, 278n52; Jewish physicians and, 37; militarism and, 281n2; unification of Muslim Spain, 56, 69 almoxarife, 131, 288n10 Alubel, Samaya, 238 Amram Gaon, 37 Anatoli, Jacob, 89, 162 al-­Andalusi, Sa‘id, 14 Andalusia, 199–200, 227, 256, 260. See also al-­Andalus (Muslim Spain); Christian Iberia Andalusi Jews: anti-­Jewish measures and, 57–66; Arabization of, 13–14, 29, 34, 80; aristocratic lineage and, 48–49; communal identity and, 14–15, 20; cross-­cultural encounter, 90, 93, 103–4; economic life and, 25–27; emigration to Christian Iberia, 70–75, 82, 86; emigration to southern France, 76, 82, 86; exile from al-­Andalus, 55, 60, 62, 64–66; halakhic codes and, 42–43, 45; historical information on, 274nn3,4; independence from Baghdadi rabbis, 15–17, 275n14; influence of

Maimonides, 88; integration of disparate groups, 13–14, 17, 275n13; intellectual culture and, 20, 22, 25, 29, 47–53; interfaith relations and, 29, 73; land ownership and, 25, 27, 276n31; literary heritage of, 77–81; partnerships with non-­Jews, 25, 276n30; political power and, 20–21, 25; prayer leaders and, 41–42; relationships with Muslims, 27–34; relations with Christian Europe, 26, 69, 75, 80–81; relations with North Africa and Near East, 21; religious and civil leadership of, 17–18; religious identity and, 28, 33–34, 54; rival factions and, 54; self-­government and, 22–24; social history of, 17; social mobility and, 4, 21; social subjugation of, 29–34, 56–59; socioeconomic stratification and, 27; spiritual alienation and, 11–12, 40–41; violence against, 62–63. See also dhimmis (ahl al-­dhimma); Hispano-­Jewish society; Sephardic Jews anusim, 216–17, 219–20, 298nn34,42 ‘Aqedat Yitzhak (The Binding of Isaac) (Arama), 245 Arab elites, 48–49 Arabic language: Andalusi Jewish writing and, 31–32; Iberian peninsula and, 13; Islamic theology and, 29, 35; Jewish elites and, 3, 14, 29, 32, 35, 49, 75; Jewish intellectuals and, 3, 14, 78–80; Jewish poetry and, 38; Judeo-­Arabic, 34, 75 Arabic texts, 77–79, 84, 95 ‘arabiyya, 49, 76 Aragon. See Crown of Aragon Arama, Isaac, 245–46 Arba’ah Turim (The Four Rows) (Jacob ben Asher), 104, 164 Arbués, Pedro, 260 Aristotle, 86, 90–91, 95, 152, 243 Armleder massacres, 294n1 Arnau de Vilanova, 166 Arragel, Moses, 245 Arrundí, Isaac, 233 Asher ben Yehiel, 103–4, 138, 154, 156–57, 161 Ashkenazi, 86, 103, 152–54, 162, 164, 271 Ashkenazi, Dan, 94 ashmurot vigils, 40, 159 Ashtor, Eliyahu, 1–2, 274nn3,4 Avenbruch, Salamon, 121, 287n64 Avenjacob, Salamon, 148

Index Ávila, 127, 223, 227 Avincacez family, 234 Baer, Yitzhak, 1–2, 288n7 Baghdad Jews, 15–18, 52, 275n18 Bahya ben Asher, 162 Baquix, Salomón, 240 Barcelona: anti-­Jewish violence in, 177, 179, 201–3, 244; Black Death in, 177, 179, 182; Council of One Hundred in, 184; inquisitorial tribunals in, 259; Jewish artisans in, 142; Jewish communities in, 65–66, 128, 240, 275n17; Jewish elites in, 65; Jewish intellectuals in, 78–79, 170; Jewish merchants and, 146; Jewish refugees in, 171–72; Jewish women and magic in, 165; rabbinic responsa and, 65, 282n21; takkanot organization in, 183–84, 206. See also Catalonia; Crown of Aragon Baron, Salo, 275n13 Benedict XIII, 197, 207, 213, 215–16 Benjamin of Tudela, 80 Benjamin Ze‘ev ben Mattathias, 221 Be Not Like unto Thy Fathers (Honoratus de Bonafide), 218 Benvenist, Todroz, 149 Benvenist de la Cavalleria, 214 Benveniste, Sheshet, 77, 283n52 Bernáldez, Andrés, 248 Bernard of Sédirac, 69 Besalú, 66 Bibago, Abraham, 243 biblical exegesis: humanism and, 245; Jewish sermons and, 162; kabbalistic ideas and, 160; philological exposition and, 35–36; Rashi and, 103, 153; Sephardic Jews and, 49–50 Bienveniste, Abraham, 234–38, 264 Bienveniste, Yuçaf, 238 Bikur Holim societies, 138, 290n34 Billalon, Abraham Comineto de, 241 Biton, Yuçe, 240 Black Death: anti-­Jewish violence during, 125, 168, 176–82, 184–85, 193–94, 294n1, 295n18; Christian clerics accused of spreading, 178; collapse of social institutions during, 176–77, 180–82; emigration of Jews during, 183; impact on population, 176–77; Jewish responses to, 182–86; Jews accused of poisoning wells, 177–78, 295n19; medical

327

treatises and, 151; social order and, 139; theories on deliberate spread of, 177–78; wearing of talismans and, 166 Blaise, Armengaud, 171 Blanch, Pere, 180 Boco, Abrahen, 134–35 Bonafed, Solomon, 214, 247 Book of Education, The (Sefer ha-­Hinukh), 163 Book of Tahkemoni, The (Alharizi), 34, 50 Book of the Kuzari (Halevi), 46, 79 Book of the Many-­Colored Flower Beds, The (Ibn Janah), 79 Book of the Roots, The (Ibn Janah), 79 Book of Tradition (Ibn Daud), 31, 279n83 Book of Uprightness (Sefer Meisharim) (Yeruham ben Meshullam), 164 Book of Women’s Love, The (Sefer Ahavat Nashim), 165 Borja, 142 Burgos, 107, 111, 127, 130, 199, 211–12, 226 caballeros villanos, 111–12, 182 Cádiz, 260 Cairo Geniza, 273n2, 274n3 Calatayud, 133, 135, 173, 176, 215, 244 Calatrava, 65, 68 Calvert, Arnau, 180 Camino de Santiago, 66, 69–70, 282n24 Candelabrum of Light (Aboab), 162–63 Candelabrum of Light (Al-­Nakawa), 159–60, 163 Canpanton, Isaac, 244–45 Cantar de mio Cid, 143 Cantigas de Santa María (Songs of Holy Mary), 121–23, 143 Carmona, 254, 260 Caro, Isaac, 245 Carvajal, Luis de, 270 Caslari, Abraham, 149–50, 182–83 Caslari, David, 150–51 Castelló d’Empúries, 107 Castile: Andalusi elites in, 64–65; anti-­Jewish sentiment in, 121–22; anti-­Jewish violence in, 187–88, 193, 199–200; caballeros villanos, 111–12; Christian administration of, 119; Christian-­Jewish relations in, 111–18, 121, 239, 286n46; Christian monasteries in, 69; civil war in, 187–90, 193, 234; conquest of Muslim territories, 114, 169; conversos (Jewish converts) in, 230; credit in, 143,

328

Index

Castile (continued) 145; crown rabbi (rab major), 132; efforts to mark Jews, 117–18; esoteric doctrines in, 96; expulsion of Jews from, 225, 261; francos (tax-­exempt), 133; imprisonment of Jews, 112; inquisitorial tribunals in, 258–59; Jewish communities in, 65–67, 69, 107, 109–10, 128, 226–27, 235; Jewish courtiers in, 112–13; Jewish elites in, 233; Jewish merchants in, 241; Jewish moneylenders in, 127, 145; Jewish physicians in, 151; Jewish religious rights in, 229; Jewish scholars in, 75, 81–83, 244–45; Jewish status in, 111–14; Jewish women moneylenders in, 146; kabbalists in, 94–96, 101; legal equality in, 70–71; Maimonidean controversies and, 84; middle class in, 69–70; as part of Sepharad, 80; relations with Crown of Aragon, 189–92; royal intervention in Jewish communal affairs, 233; royal sovereignty in, 109–12; Siete Partidas, Las, 113–14; taxation of Jews in, 188–91; united with Aragon under Ferdinand and Isabella, 255; War of the Two Peters and, 189–90, 193 Castilian Jews: Arabic language and, 75; Christian attacks on, 74; Christian conflicts and, 254; collapse of royal support, 112–13; connections with Portuguese Jews, 9; converso heresy associations and, 173, 250, 256, 258–61; as courtiers, 46–47, 66–67, 187; distinguishing marks and, 117–18; juez mayor position, 241; mobility of, 192–93; payments to royal treasury, 236–38; rab de la corte position and, 235–38; royal privileges and, 110, 188; royal sovereignty over, 109–12; royal support for religious life, 74, 113–18, 190, 287n56, 300n37; segregation of, 255–58; social interactions with Christians, 117–18, 287n61; takkanot organization and, 236–38; tax burden on, 188–93; tax collection and, 240; violence towards, 187–88 Castillo, Alvar Gómez del, 268 Castro, Américo, 273n2 Catalina, Queen, 216, 264 Catalonia: anti-­Jewish violence in, 223; Black Death in, 176–77, 181; famines in, 175; Jewish communities in, 67, 76, 90, 106; Jewish merchants in, 106–7; Jewish refugees and, 170; kabbalists in, 94; Maimonidean

controversies and, 84; northern expansion of, 76; rabbinic scholars in, 82; resistance to the Inquisition in, 260. See also Barcelona; Crown of Aragon Cefarim brotherhood, 140 Çerulla, Simuel, 241 Cervera, 203, 230 Charles IV, 174 Christiani, Paul, 100–101 Christian Iberia: Andalusi Jewish settlement in, 55, 59, 64, 70–75, 82, 86; anti-­Jewish riots in, 125–26, 193, 199–202, 223; anti-­ Jewish sentiment, 74, 109–12, 114–16, 121–23, 143–44, 253–54; assimilation of conversos, 207–10, 218, 248–52; association of Jews with banking and tax-­gathering, 68, 75; demand for medical expertise, 148–51; ecclesiastical institutions in, 99–100; expansion of, 70–76, 114; fuero for conquered territories, 70–72; impact of Andalusi Jews in, 75–81; interfaith relations in, 82–83, 108–23, 125–26, 137, 149, 167–75, 192, 195, 218, 226, 253; Jewish communities in, 6–7, 56, 65–70, 82, 106, 282n24; Jewish courtiers and, 66–67, 75, 81–82, 136; Jewish culture and, 68, 82–83, 88; Jewish elites in, 64–65; Jewish legal protections in, 72–74, 104, 123– 24; Jewish merchants and, 67–68; Jewish refugees and, 170; Jewish religious rights in, 74, 113–19, 287n56; Jewish status in, 71–72, 108–24; legal references to nonbelievers, 281n7; notaries in, 107–8; political instability in, 231; rabbinic responsa and, 45; repayment of Jewish debts in, 110; segregation of Jews, 255–58; translation movement in, 78–80. See also Hispano-­Christian society; Jews of Christian Iberia Christianity: demonization of Jews in, 121–23, 174, 197–98; Disputation of Tortosa and, 8, 207, 210, 214–16; Jewish converts to, 74, 100, 173, 211–13, 218; Jewish polemics against, 218; Marian miracle compilations, 121–23; mysticism and, 270; papal inquisition and, 173, 185, 259; protection of Jews and, 185; religious identity and, 217–18; Roman Empire and, 5; use of magic, 165–66, 294n94; Visigothic Spain and, 13. See also conversos (Jewish converts) Christian municipal councils. See concejos (Christian municipal councils)

Index Christians: accused of spreading plague, 178; anti-­converso sentiment, 210–11, 219, 226, 248–50, 252–53, 262, 265, 269; anti-­Jewish preaching, 197–99, 296n3; anti-­Jewish sentiment, 172, 192–93, 291n48; anti-­ Judaism and, 7–8, 100, 121–23; assimilation of conversos, 207–10, 218; attitudes towards Jews, 73–74, 82–83, 112, 114–16; deportation to North Africa, 281n6; as enemies of Muslim state, 58; engagement with Jewish community, 107–8; forced conversions of Jews, 6, 8, 13, 195–203, 207–8, 273n3; indebtedness to Jews, 7, 144–45, 169; kabbalistic ideas and, 96; merchant trade and, 147, 242; missionary activity toward Jews, 8, 74–75, 99–101, 123, 161–62, 169, 195–98, 207–8, 210, 214–16; moneylending and, 68, 112, 144–45, 240; objections to Jewish social mobility, 4; “Old” vs. “New,” 207, 209, 216, 223, 248, 250–53, 259; preaching and, 161–62, 197, 246–47; public disputations and, 100–101; segregation from Jews, 255–57; Shepherd’s Crusade (Pastoureaux) rioting, 172; social subjugation of, 58; violence towards Jews, 7–8, 74, 115–16, 198–203 Çidre, Menahem, 234 Ciudad Real, 258 Ciudad Rodrigo, 239 Cluniac monasteries, 69, 74 collectas (tax groupings), 127–28, 191, 227 commentaries, 103, 152–53, 292n69 Commentary on Blessings and Prayers, 163 Commentary on the Mishnah (Maimonides), 79 Commentary on the Torah (Nahmanides), 93 commercial brokers (corredor), 147 communal politics: breakdown of leadership, 205–6, 232–33; Christian intervention in, 232–33; collectas (tax groupings) and, 127–28, 191; confraternities in, 137–40, 192; courtiers and, 19, 129–32, 234–38; crown rabbi (rab major), 132–33; democratic reform in, 232; elites and, 20–22, 233–34; factionalism and, 231–32; francos (tax-­ exempt), 133–34; impact of riots on, 264; self-­government and, 22–24, 43, 128–29, 140; social divisions in, 134–35; social status and, 133–37, 289n17; takkanot organization in, 183–84, 206; wealthy

329

and well-­connected, 135–36, 139. See also aljamas communal scribes (sofrei ha-­kahal), 108 concejos (Christian municipal councils): anti-­Jewish sentiment, 197–98; caballeros villanos and, 111–12; independence of, 104; Jewish-­Christian relations and, 111–12, 125; Jewish physicians in, 241; Jewish status and, 238; overcrowding of juderías and, 257; restriction of Jewish rights, 229, 258; royal support for, 191 confraternities (havarot): burial societies and, 138; financial troubles and, 192; Jewish drapers and, 135; kahal decision-­making and, 139–40; member dues and, 139; religious goals and, 138; social welfare and, 137–40; synagogues of, 140, 290n34 Constance of Burgundy, 69 conversos (Jewish converts): Almohad rulers and, 6, 59–61, 196; anti-­Jewish violence and, 197–205, 209, 223, 254, 269; anti-­ Judaism and, 197, 229–30; as anusim, 216–17, 219–20, 298nn34,42; assimilation into Christian society, 207–10, 218, 248–52, 269; Christian doubts on, 210–11, 219, 226, 248–50, 252–53, 264; contact between Jews and, 208–9, 230, 250–51, 265, 268; as courtiers, 233, 251–52; crypto-­Judaism and, 218, 253, 269–70; debt collection and, 203; discriminatory laws against, 208–11, 216, 297n21; Disputation of Tortosa and, 207, 210, 214–16; divided families and, 204–5, 213, 217–18, 251; economic roles and, 235; escape to North Africa by, 205, 211, 219–21; forced conversions and, 195–210, 214–17; impact of, 8–9, 218, 226; intellectual culture and, 242, 247, 249; interfaith polemics and, 197, 296n3; Islam and, 30; Jewish-­ Christian relations and, 195–96, 223–24, 242; Jewish distrust of, 218–22, 251; Jewish leaders and, 211–15, 218; Jewish responses to, 211–13, 216–22; judaizing of, 173, 222, 250–54, 256, 259, 265; Laws of Ayllón and, 209, 216, 235; legal restrictions on, 253–54; Maimonides on, 61; mass conversions and, 205–8, 219, 239, 299n5; merchant trade and, 242, 251; as meshummadim (apostates), 298n34; migration to Northern Europe, 269; moneylending and, 240; Muslim rejection of, 60; mysticism

330

Index

conversos (Jewish converts) (continued) and, 270; Old Christian relations with, 207, 209, 216, 223, 248, 250–53; opportunism and, 213, 215, 218–19; overtaxing of Jewish community and, 226, 230, 299n14; political power and, 252; religious identity and, 217–23, 250–51; repentance and purification of, 221–22; resistance to the Inquisition, 260; reversion to Judaism, 173, 205–6, 211, 219–23, 269, 298n41; Second Coming and, 207–8; segregation of Jews and, 255–58, 260–62; socioeconomic desperation and, 196; tax collection and, 251; trade networks with Jews, 230; Visigoths and, 13, 196; voluntary conversion, 211–13, 216 convivencia, 1–3, 5, 273n2 Córdoba: anti-­converso riots in, 254; anti-­ Jewish riots in, 33, 59; Berber revolt in, 19; Castilian conquest of, 114; collectas (tax groupings), 128; expulsion of Jews from, 260; inquisitorial tribunals in, 258; Jewish communities in, 20, 128; Jewish elites in, 14–18, 20, 47, 51–52; Jewish governance in, 105; Jewish political factions in, 18–21; Muslim relations with Jewish community, 20–21; rabbinic study in, 16–18, 279n83; redemption of Jewish captives in, 23; Umayyad Caliphate and, 13–16, 18–20, 22 Cordovero, Moses, 270 Coronel, Fernán Núñez de, 263 Coronel, Fernán Pérez de, 263 Cortes of Haro, 111 Cortes of Madrigal, 257 Cortes of Soria, 288n12 Cortes of Toledo, 257 Cota, Alonso, 252 Council of Elvira, 5 courtiers: administrative activities, 131, 288n10; aljama governance and, 233; association with royal corruption and oppression, 106; Christian rulers and, 66–67, 75, 81–82, 112–13, 136; as communal representatives, 129–31; conflict with kahal, 105, 125, 130, 132, 212; conversions to Christianity and, 263; at Córdoba, 14–15, 17–18, 20; decline of, 129; disapproval of, 32, 129–30, 277n44; fall from royal favor, 131; impact on Jewish society, 105–6; independent principalities (taifas) and, 22, 31; literary attacks on, 32–33; moral turpitude of, 129,

288n7; Muslim rulers and, 5–6, 15, 17, 19, 21–22, 28–32, 57; philosophical study and, 97; political power and, 19, 129–32, 234–38; popular enmity and, 31; as privados, 129; replaced with conversos, 233; rivalries among, 131–32; royal appointment as judge, 132; as royal bailiffs, 129; royal favor and, 130–31; royal politics and, 131; social integration of, 21, 275n13; tax farming and, 105, 131, 235, 238, 245; wealth and, 193 credit: anti-­Jewish sentiment and, 143–44, 192, 291n52; censal and violari, 144; Christian indebtedness to Jews, 7, 144–45, 169; Christian indirect lending, 145; Christian-­Jewish relations in, 143–45, 192; Christian moneylending and, 68, 112, 144–45, 240; conversos and, 240; debt collection and, 143–45, 263; decline in moneylending, 239; destruction of debt records and, 192, 202, 239; Jewish moneylending and, 68, 112, 126–27, 141–45, 189, 239–40, 291n50; Jewish women moneylending and, 141, 146; legal costs of, 143; Muslims and, 144, 291n50; popular animosity and, 143; real-­estate speculation and, 145–46; rural indebtedness and, 144; Spanish society and, 143; violence against Jewish lenders, 179–80 Crescas, Hasdai, 199, 204, 206, 214, 231, 235, 242 Crown of Aragon: anti-­Jewish sentiment, 173–74, 182; anti-­Jewish violence in, 201–2; ban on Jewish trade, 147; Black Death in, 176, 178–79, 181–82; Christian administration of, 119; civil war in, 175– 76, 182, 193; confraternities in, 137; credit in, 143–44, 291n49; efforts to mark Jews, 118; famines in, 175; fiscal problems in, 192; fiscal revolution in, 144–45, 291n49; forced conversions and, 201–2, 215; francos (tax-­exempt), 133; Hispano-­Christian society and, 69; Ibn Adret authority in, 101; inquisitorial tribunals in, 259–60; Jewish administration of, 120; Jewish communities in, 67, 74, 128, 228–30, 235; Jewish economic development and, 189; Jewish elites in, 233; Jewish intellectuals and, 75; Jewish merchants and, 75; Jewish moneylending and, 240; Jewish physicians in, 151; Jewish privy councilors in, 129; Jewish refugees and, 170–71; Jewish

Index religious rights in, 229, 287n56; Jewish scholars in, 83; Jewish women moneylending and, 146; notaries in, 107–8; overtaxing of Jewish community and, 230; papal support for, 70; Provence and, 76; public disputations and, 101; relations with Castile, 189–92; religious tensions in, 173–74; replacement of courtiers with conversos, 233; royal protections and, 229–30; Sephardic Jews and, 76; sermon books in, 162; Shepherd’s Crusade massacres, 172; social divisions in, 134; study of medicine in, 149; takkanot organization in, 184–86; united with Castile under Ferdinand and Isabella, 255 crown rabbi (rab major), 132–33 Cuenca, 258 Cyprus, 146 Da Piera, Solomon, 214–15 Darkhei ha-­Talmud (The Ways of Talmud) (Canpanton), 244 Daroca, 228 David ben Judah he-­Hasid, 92 David ben Saadia al-­Ger, 45 De Corbera, Gilbert, 179–81 De Lupia, Arnau, 178 Denia, 26 De Tallarn, Atarn, 181 De Torre, Abraham, 136 dhimmis (ahl al-­dhimma): Almohad abolition of, 59–60, 62; Almoravid dynasty and, 57–58; distinctions between Muslims and, 28–29; expectations of humility, 28, 56–58; as protected people, 28–29; undesirable jobs and, 29–30 diaspora, 12; Geonim authority and, 15; Jewish cultural identity and, 270–71; Jewish liturgical practices and, 41, 279n76; nação (nation), 269; Sephardic, 245, 248, 269–71; spiritual alienation and, 40–41. See also expulsion of Jews Disputation of Barcelona, 162 Disputation of Tortosa: Christian missionizing and, 210, 214; discrediting of Judaism, 214–15; forced conversions and, 8, 207, 210, 216; growth of Jewish communities after, 228–29; royal protections after, 225–26, 229 Domingo de Tarva, 134 Donin, Nicholas, 100

331

Duran, Profayt, 218, 242, 247, 301n49. See also Honoratus de Bonafide Duran, Semah ben Solomon, 223 Duran, Simeon ben Semah, 206, 220, 222, 298n42 Duran, Solomon ben Simeon, 220, 222–23, 298n42 Duties of the Heart (Ibn Paquda), 79, 159 Écija, Yuçaf de, 131 economic life: agricultural labor and, 24, 26–27, 142, 240, 276n31; Andalusi Jews and, 25–27; animal herds and, 276n30; artisans and, 26–27, 141–42, 240; care of exotic animals, 142; commercial agents and brokers, 147; credit and, 143–44; entertainers and, 142; impact of conversos on, 239; Jewish occupations in, 27, 141–42, 239–40; Jewish women and, 23, 146, 148; medical profession and, 148–51, 241; merchant trade and, 25–27, 141, 146–47, 241–42; moneylending and, 68, 112, 126–27, 141–45, 239–40; real-­estate speculation and renting, 145–46; silversmithing and, 142, 240; tax collection and, 240–41; viticulture and, 27, 142, 290n44. See also credit; Jewish merchants Egypt: Jewish communities in, 18; Maimonides and, 45, 55, 61; rabbinic academies in, 16; trade between al-­Andalus and, 23, 25–26, 146 Ençinas, Arias de, 245 Enrique II, 130, 132, 198 Enrique III, 198, 212 Enrique IV, 241, 254–55 Enrique of Aragon, Prince, 234 Enrique Trastámara, 187–88, 193 Espina, Alonso de, 253–54 Estadella, Arnau, 197 Estori ha-­Parhi, 171 Eugene IV, Pope, 253 European Jews: Andalusi intellectual heritage and, 79; contact with Andalusi Jews, 90, 93; cross-­cultural encounter, 103–4, 123; encounter with Greco-­Arabic science and philosophy, 83, 90; expulsion from England and France, 170–71; Maimonidean controversies and, 83–85; scholarly traditions of, 86; translations of sacred texts, 84–85

332

Index

Exilarch, 275n20 expulsion of Jews: dissemination of kabbalistic thought and, 270; edict of, 225, 248–49, 262–63; emigration to Portugal, 268; from England, 170–71; exile ties to homeland, 268; forced conversions and, 263–64, 267; from France, 170–71; hardships of exile and, 263–64, 302n71; from Portugal, 264, 268; prevention of influence on conversos, 9, 249; restoration of property upon return, 267–68; return and conversion, 267–69; sense of displacement and, 171, 271; Sephardic culture and, 269–71; from Spain, 1, 8, 126, 225, 227, 241, 248–49, 260–64, 267 Façan, Jucef, 166 Falcoquera, Jucef, 179 Ferdinand II: conquest of Granada, 61, 262; expansion of Inquisition and, 256, 258–60; expulsion edict and, 9, 225, 248, 262, 267; marriage to Isabella, 255; pressure on Portuguese kingdom, 264, 268; royal authority in Castile, 231; segregation of Jews, 255–58; uniting crowns of Aragon and Castile, 255. See also Isabella I Fernando I, 68, 216 Ferrer, Vincent, 196, 207–10, 214, 216, 229 Figueruela, Jahuda, 234 First Kennicott Bible, 245 Folquet, Ramon, 180 forced conversions of Jews. See conversos (Jewish converts) Fortalitium Fidei (Fortress of the Faith) (Espina), 253–54 Foundations of Understanding and the Tower of Faith, The (bar Hiyya), 84 Fourth Lateran Council, 113, 116–17, 148, 286n46 Franco, Yuçe, 261 francos (tax-­exempt), 133–34, 184, 233, 288n14, 289n17 French Tosafists (glossators), 86, 97, 103 Furs of Valencia, 118, 229 Galicia, 9, 223, 228, 240, 258 gambling, 140–41 García-­Serrano, Francisco, 291n48 Gento de Narbona, 190

Geonim of Baghdad: decline of academies, 17; fixed prayers and, 38; political power and, 275n20; religious expertise of, 15–16, 18, 37, 52, 275n18; on sacred nature of Mishnah, 44; transfer of religious leadership to Andalusi Jews, 16, 64 Gerber, Jane S., 273n1 Gerondi, Jonah, 101, 161, 163 Gigante, Yucef, 232 Gikatilla, Joseph, 91, 94 Gil de Zamora, Juan, 122 Girona, 66, 175, 182, 205, 229, 232 Girondi, Jonah, 103 Goitein, S. D., 274n3 Goldberg, Jessica, 277n42 Gómez Barroso, Pedro, 198 Gonzalo de Berceo, 122 Granada: anti-­Jewish riots in, 19, 33; Christian advance on, 260; expulsion of Jews from, 261; Ferdinand and Isabella conquest of, 61, 262; inquisitorial tribunals in, 258; Jewish communities in, 19–20, 61–62, 260, 275n18; Jewish elites in, 47; Muslim communities in, 260–61, 275n18 Greek philosophy: European Jews and, 83, 90; Hispano-­Christian society and, 88; Ibn Adret ban on study of, 101–2, 285n29; Judaism and, 86, 88, 91; Maimonides and, 79, 91; rationalism and, 89; translation into Hebrew, 78, 151–52 Gregory VII, Pope, 70 Gregory IX, Pope, 287n61 Guide for the Perplexed, The (Maimonides), 79, 83, 86–87, 98 Guzmán, Luis de, 245 Habillo, Abraham, 232 Habillo, Eli, 243 Hai Gaon, 35, 41 ha-­Kohen, Moses, 197 halakhah. See Jewish law (halakhah) Halakhot ha-­Gedolot, 45 Halevi, Astruc, 214–15 Halevi, Judah: Book of the Kuzari, 46, 79; on decline of Andalusi-­Jewish culture, 37; on Jewish life in Christian Iberia, 73; muwashshah poem for Cidellus, 67; pilgrimage to Jerusalem, 12, 55; ransoming

Index of captive, 23, 282n30; spiritual alienation and, 11–12, 26, 40 Halevi, Samuel, 187 Halevi, Solomon, 211–13. See also Santa María, Pablo de Halevi, Zerahia, 214 Halevi Abulafia, Samuel, 131 Halfon ben Netanel, 23 Halorki, Joshua, 212–13. See also Jerónimo de Santa Fé Hanokh ben Moses, 17–18, 23 Hayyim el Levi, 132 Hayyuj, Judah, 35–36, 78 Hebrew Bible, 35 Hebrew language: Arabic grammatical forms and, 51–53; biblical commentaries in, 84–85; Judeo-­Arabic and, 34; literacy and, 7, 29, 158; literary composition and, 7, 29, 34–35, 49–50, 152; liturgical poems and, 38; poetry and, 107, 152; religious authority and, 35; Sephardic writers and, 34–35, 49–50; synagogue service and, 38–39; translation of Arabic texts into, 78–79, 84; translation of esoteric doctrines into, 96; translation of Greco-­Arabic philosophy and science, 78, 83, 90, 151–52; translation of Judeo-­Arabic learning into, 55–56, 79–80, 84–85 Hilkheta Gavrata (Major Jewish Laws), 45 Hispano-­Christian society: associations of Jews with Muslims, 74; attitudes towards Jews, 123, 208, 216; esoteric doctrines in, 96; Greek philosophy and, 88; integration of conversos in, 248; intellectual culture and, 88; Jewish courtiers and, 67; Jewish place in, 109; Muslim raiding and tribute, 69; popular uprisings in, 182; power dynamics in, 69–70. See also Christian Iberia Hispano-­Jewish society: biblical Hebrew and, 50; economic rivalries in, 192; influence of Latinate culture, 80; integration of Provençal Jews, 170–73; intellectual culture and, 104; Jewish law and, 45; localized governance and, 102–3; political instability and, 231; professional dynasties in, 156; religious debates and, 104; scholars in, 245; Sephardic intellectual culture and, 54, 80, 83; Talmudic study and, 152; views of Jews

333

as enemies of Christendom, 124. See also Andalusi Jews Hispano-­Provençal Jews, 88, 97, 102–3 Hojeda, Alonso de, 256 Holy Child of La Guardia, 261–62 Holy Office, 259–60 Honoratus de Bonafide, 218, 242. See also Duran, Profayt Hospina, Rabbi, 232 Huesca, 74, 136, 138, 144, 155–56, 232–33 Hugh of Cluny, 69 Hurtado de Mendoza, Juan, 234 Iberian Peninsula: Almoravid dynasty and, 57; Arabic language and, 13; Jewish communities in, 1, 9, 126–27; Muslim power in, 20; political power and, 126; Visigoth control of, 5. See also Spain Ibn Abbas, Judah, 86 Ibn ‘Abdun, 58 Ibn Abitur, Joseph, 18 Ibn Adret, Solomon: ban on ecstatic Kabbalah, 101; ban on study of Greek philosophy, 101–2, 285n29; condemnation of gambling, 141; halakhic authority and, 101, 103; Jewish orthodoxy and, 102–3; kabbalistic study and, 96; limits on kabbalistic teaching, 101; on reversion to Judaism, 222, 298n39; on selection of cantor, 155–57; students of, 162–63; synthesis of traditions, 103; on wearing of talismans, 166 Ibn al-­Kardabus, 57, 277n44 Ibn ‘Aqnin, Joseph ben Judah, 61 Ibn Bassam, 32 Ibn Capron, Isaac, 52 Ibn Chaim, Joseph, 246 Ibn Daud, Abraham: Andalusi intellectual heritage and, 85; Andalusi Jewish lineage and, 47; on authority of Andalusi elites, 64–65; on fall of Andalusi Jewry, 62–64; Jewish law and, 45; on redemption of captives, 22–23; on religious autonomy in Córdoba, 16–18; Sefer ha-­Qabbalah (Book of Tradition), 16, 31, 46, 279n83; Sephardic identity and, 53; “Story of the Four Captives,” 16, 64, 279n83 Ibn Ezra, Abraham, 36–37, 45, 84–85, 153 Ibn Ezra, Judah, 66–69 Ibn Ezra, Moses, 34–35, 37, 47, 49–50, 247

334

Index

Ibn Falija family, 16–18 Ibn Gabirol, Samuel, 50–51 Ibn Gabirol, Solomon, 19, 37, 39 Ibn Gharsiyah, Abu ‘Amir, 49 Ibn Ghiyyat, Judah, 23 Ibn Gikatilla, Isaac, 52 Ibn Gikatilla, Moses, 34, 78 Ibn Habib, Jacob, 245 Ibn Hasdai, Judah, 78 Ibn Hayyan, 31–32 Ibn Hazm, 32 Ibn Janah, Jonah, 36, 46, 78–79, 280n102 Ibn Jau, Jacob, 18 Ibn Joseph, Joshua Galuf, 231 Ibn Labrat, Dunash, 40–41, 46, 51–53 Ibn Latif, Isaac, 95 Ibn Migash, Joseph, 19, 24, 38, 42–43, 45 Ibn Musa, Hayyim, 243 Ibn Naghrilla, Joseph, 31–33, 50 Ibn Naghrilla, Samuel: Andalusi Jewish culture and, 76; critique of Jewish intellectuals, 32, 44; critique of Muslim intellectuals, 32; Hebrew poetry and, 49–50; Hilkheta Gavrata (Major Jewish Laws), 45; as Jewish courtier, 19, 31, 49–50; legal studies and, 31, 45, 49; on length of synagogue services, 278n68; as Muslim army general, 19, 31; on religious practices, 41; on Talmudic study, 43–44 Ibn Paquda, Bahya, 79, 159 Ibn Qamniel, Abu ‘l-­Hasan Meir, 37, 59 Ibn Sahl, Joseph, 49 Ibn Sahula, Isaac, 94 Ibn Sahula, Meir ben Solomon, 90 Ibn Saruq, Menahem, 34, 46, 51–53, 281n102 Ibn Sasson, Samuel, 131, 145 Ibn Shaprut, Hasdai, 14–15, 17–20, 25, 47–48, 51–52, 66 Ibn Shaprut, Isaac, 15 Ibn Shaprut, Shem Tov, 197 Ibn Shem Tov, Shem Tov, 245 Ibn Sheshet, Judah, 53 Ibn Shoshan, Samuel ben Zadok, 164 Ibn Shueib, Joshua, 160–62 Ibn Tashfin, Yusuf, 57 Ibn Tibbon, Judah, 76–78, 80, 84, 284n52 Ibn Tibbon, Samuel, 76–79, 83, 85–87, 89 Ibn Tumart, Abu ‘Abd Allah, 59 Ibn Wakar, Samuel, 131 Ibn Waqar, Joseph, 78

Ibn Yashush, Abu Ibrahim Isaac, 28 Ibn Yusuf, Ali, 37 Ibn Zabara, Moses, 245 Ibn Zarza, Samuel, 188 Ibn Zerah, Menahem, 154, 173–74, 188 Ifriqiya, 16, 274n9 Infante Juan, 233–34 Innocent VI, Pope, 184 Inquisition: Aragonese, 259; auto-­da-­fé in, 260, 302n68; Castilian, 254, 256, 258–59; converso heresy and, 173, 250, 256, 258–62; distrust of Castilian, 259–60; influence in Aragonese society, 173, 185; Jewish testimonies to, 250; papal, 259; Portuguese, 269; royal control of, 256, 258–59 Iolant, Queen, 201, 206 Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet (Ribash), 135, 141, 157, 165, 206, 214, 217 Isaac ben Simeon, 37 Isaac of Acre, 94–95 Isaac the Blind, 93–94 Isabella I: conquest of Granada, 61, 262; expansion of Inquisition and, 256, 258–60; expulsion edict and, 9, 225, 248, 262, 267; marriage to Ferdinand II of Aragon, 231, 255; pressure on Portuguese kingdom, 264, 268; royal authority in Castile, 231; segregation of Jews, 255–58; uniting crowns of Aragon and Castile, 255. See also Ferdinand II Ishmael, Isaac, 104 Islam: Almohad dynasty and, 59; anti-­Jewish sentiment, 30, 32; anti-­Jewish violence and, 116; Arabic language and, 14, 29, 35; expectations of humility for dhimmis, 28, 56; importance of lineage in, 48; rejection of Jewish converts to, 30, 60; social subjugation of Jews, 33, 56. See also Muslims Islamic jurists (fuqaha), 28 Iyyun Sefardi (“Sephardic speculation”), 244–45 Jacob ben Asher, 104, 161, 164 Jaén, 258 Jaume, Count, 175–76 Jaume I, 100, 108, 118–21 Jaume II, 120–21, 134, 149, 183, 192 Jerez de la Frontera, 260 Jerónimo de Santa Fé, 211, 213–16, 218 Jerusalem, 12, 40–41, 47–48

Index Jewish converts (conversos). See conversos (Jewish converts) Jewish elites: academies of Baghdad and, 18; Arabic language and, 3, 14, 29, 31–32, 34, 49; Christian society and, 241; at Córdoba, 14–18; exile in Christian Iberia, 64–65; francos (tax-­exempt), 133, 149–50, 184, 233; hierarchies of power and, 17–19; honorary titles and, 233–34; independence from Baghdadi rabbis, 15–16; intellectual culture and, 6, 8, 42; Muslim attacks on, 32–33; political power and, 20–22, 233–34; rivalries between, 51, 120–21; Sephardic identity and, 47–48, 50–51; status in Muslim world, 19, 21; takkanot organization and, 206 Jewish intellectual life: abandonment of Córdoba, 19; in al-­Andalus, 3, 6, 12, 14, 25; Arabic language and, 3, 14, 34, 75, 78; biblical exegesis and, 35–36, 153; collaboration with Christians, 78; conversos and, 242, 247; expansion of curriculum, 151; Hebrew language and, 35, 49–50, 152; Ibn Naghrilla critique of, 32; independence from Baghdadi rabbis, 15; influence of Christian society, 152; interactions with European Jews, 75; interactions with Muslim intellectuals, 29–30; Jewish rivalries in, 35; kabbalists and, 152, 301n49; literary and legal composition, 3, 68; maskilim, 271; rationalism and, 89; religious inquiry and, 37; rival factions and, 51–53; scholastic philosophy and, 152, 242–43; Sephardic identity and, 49–51, 54, 247–48, 269–71; supercommentaries and, 152–53, 292n69; Talmudic study and, 43–44, 152–53, 301n49 Jewish law (halakhah): Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions in, 164; Baghdad institutions and, 16; crown rabbi (rab major), 132–33; divorce and, 24; kabbalists and, 101; lay audiences for, 164; Mishneh Torah and, 99; rabbinic judges and, 42–43; redeeming of Jewish captives and, 23; religious integration and, 104; study and application of, 44; synagogue and, 153; Talmud and, 36, 42–46, 86 Jewish life: ceremonies in, 140; convivencia and, 1–3, 5; games of chance and, 140–41; history in Spain, 5–9, 11–13, 54; impact of conversos on, 226; interfaith encounter and, 7; Muslim Spain and, 1–3, 273n1;

335

non-­Jewish society and, 2–5, 25, 276n30; poverty and violence in, 22–24, 276n24; precariousness of, 8, 112–13, 168, 175, 187; spiritual alienation and, 11–12; under the Visigoths, 5–6, 13, 67, 273n3, 274n4 Jewish merchants: agricultural goods and, 241; in Catalonia, 106–7; Christian European trade and, 26; as commercial agents and brokers, 147; individual geographies of trade and, 26, 277n42; long-­distance trade and, 25–27, 146–47, 241–42; Mediterranean trade and, 25–26, 67, 75; regional trade and, 25–26, 147; resettlement of, 26; royal protections and, 241; trade with Christian territories, 67–68, 170; trade with conversos, 242; violence against, 276n24; women as, 23 Jewish philosophy: Andalusi Jews and, 19, 39, 50, 53, 84–85; classical influence on, 78–79, 83–84, 86, 88, 90–91, 96; factionalism and, 97–99; Halevi and, 55; impact of Muslim texts on, 95; Jewish tradition and, 86–90; Kabbalah and, 90, 95–96; Maimonides and, 44, 79, 83, 86–88; rationalism and, 88–89, 98, 101, 103, 152 Jewish religious life: admiration for Christian religious culture, 246–47; ashmurot vigils and, 40, 159; Christian missionizing and, 99–101; control of rationalist ideas, 101; engagement of Jewish audiences, 163–64; factionalism and, 96–97, 99, 125; Hebrew language and, 38–39, 158; impact of philosophy on, 243; impact of poverty on, 138–39; individual spiritual care and, 153–54; Jewish preaching and, 160–61; Kabbalah and, 90–96, 160–61; lay participation in, 161–64; leadership and aristocracy, 48; legal integration and, 104; limits on kabbalistic teaching, 93–94, 101, 123; liturgical prayers (piyyutim) and, 37–40; local customs and, 156–59; morning blessings in, 41; mysticism and, 7, 82, 84, 243; penitential prayers (selihot) and, 39–40; philosophy and, 246; piety and, 140, 159–61, 163, 243; prayer leaders and, 41–42; preaching and, 162, 246–47; professionalization of rabbis, 158; rabbinic dynasties and, 161–62; rabbinic responsa and, 26, 45; reforms and, 157–59, 162; religious literature and, 158–59; royal support for,

336

Index

Jewish religious life (continued) 113–18, 287n56; scholars of, 163; self-­ government and, 42; sermons and, 161–62, 246; synagogue service and, 38–39, 41–42, 153–57, 278n68; Talmud as sacred text in, 42–45; use of magic, 165–67, 294n94; women and, 164–66. See also conversos (Jewish converts) Jewish scholars: Christian adversaries and, 197; Christian scholasticism and, 242–43; converso intellectuals and, 242; cross-­ cultural encounter, 83, 85–86, 103, 152–53, 245; forced conversions and, 211–15, 218; halakhah and, 105, 152, 162, 164; Hebrew language and, 49–50; Ibn Adret and, 96, 101–2; independence from Baghdadi rabbis, 16, 275n10; intellectual culture and, 86, 242, 247–48; intra-­faith disputes, 83, 85, 87, 197, 296n3; Kabbalah and, 91–96, 101, 243; magical theories and, 166; Maimonidean controversies and, 86–88, 91; manuscript illustration, 245–46; Nahmanides and, 96–101, 166; philosophy and, 242–43; political power and, 21; private midrashim and, 244; public disputations and, 101, 214–15; rabbinic, 161, 171; religious education and, 42, 157–59, 162–63; secular studies and, 88–89; yeshivot and, 127, 244–45 Jewish society: appeals for royal support, 105; breakdown of political leadership in, 205–6; charitable funds and, 139; communal identity and, 14–15, 20, 222–23; communal organization in, 19–22, 137, 229; confraternities in, 137–40; in Córdoba, 14–16; courtiers in, 129–32; crown rabbi (rab major), 132–33; economic life and, 25–27, 141–42; 13th century structure of, 104–8; 14th century structure of, 126–37; 15th century structure of, 226–30; genealogical claims in, 47–50, 280n89; Hebrew literacy in, 7, 29, 158; impact of courtiers on, 105–6; impact of mass conversions on, 2, 205, 208, 219, 226–29, 232, 239, 299n5; intellectual factions in, 35; internal dynamics of, 2–8, 27, 133–37, 140; kahal (communal councils) and, 105, 129–30, 132, 233; kehillot (communities), 19, 27, 43, 128–29, 280n88; Latinized-­Arabized encounters, 56, 123; movement between settlements,

226–29, 239, 264; political power and, 20–21, 134–36; prominent families with royal ties, 135–36, 289n23; religious culture and, 7, 42; rival factions and, 51–54; royal privileges and, 133; self-­government and, 22–24, 43, 128–29, 140, 184–86, 231–32, 288n12, 289n23; social networks and, 68, 238, 282n30; social reform and, 137; social status and, 133–37, 238–39, 241, 289n17; social welfare and, 137–38, 140, 290n29; socioeconomic stratification and, 27, 54; violence within, 136–37. See also aljamas Jewish Spain, vi, vii, 2, 271 Jewish women: bequests and, 146; divorce and, 24; economic activities and, 23; historical information on, 9, 23; magic spells and, 165–66; medical practice and, 148; moneylending and, 141, 146; Muslim world and, 23–24, 276n27; occupations and, 141–42; ransoming of captive, 23; religious life and, 164–65; violence and, 137 Jewish writing: Arabic language and, 31–32, 38; cultural loss and, 37; decline in Torah study and, 41; Hebrew language and, 34–35; poetry and, 29, 31, 44, 49, 107, 152, 158, 247, 301n49; spiritual alienation and, 40–41 Jews: associations with material wealth, 143; association with magic, 165–66; Christian attitudes towards, 73–74; Christian violence against, 7–8, 74; conversion to Islam, 30; forced conversions and, 6, 8, 13, 59–61, 195–97, 273n3; involvement in lending and tax collection, 7, 31, 68; medical practice and, 148–51; moneylending and, 68, 112, 126–27, 141–45, 291n50, 291n52; political power and, 20, 275n20; prohibitions on positions of authority, 71, 283n38; ransoming of captives, 22–23; real-­ estate speculation and renting, 145–46; relationships with Christians, 4–5, 7, 167; relationships with Muslims, 4–6, 20–21, 54, 60; religious tolerance and, 2; Roman prohibitions on, 71, 283n38; social mobility and, 4–5, 28, 170; vulnerability during political instability, 33, 74, 254. See also Andalusi Jews; Judaism Jews of Christian Iberia: accused of poisoning wells, 173, 177–78, 295n19; Andalusi intellectual heritage and, 76–77; Arabic

Index language and, 79–80; Christian attitudes towards, 82–83; Christian interactions with, 73–74, 80–81, 107–8; Christian military orders and, 75, 283n50; Christian missionizing and, 8, 74–75, 100, 123, 161–62, 169, 195–98, 207–8, 210, 214–16; Christian notaries and, 107–8; contact with Jews of Muslim lands, 75; converso heresy associations and, 173, 250, 256, 258–62, 265; as courtiers, 66–67, 75, 81–82; cross-­ cultural encounter, 103–4, 123; diplomatic missions and, 75, 190; discriminatory laws against, 208–11, 297n21; distinguishing marks and, 117–18, 208; expulsion of, 5, 9, 55, 126, 225, 248–49, 260; financial support of crown and, 110–11; fuero for, 70–72; legal protections for, 72–74; Maimonidean controversies and, 86, 88; Muslim interactions with, 107; payments to royal treasury, 68, 110, 169, 235; repayment of Christian debt to, 110; rivalries among, 125; royal administration and, 119–20, 124; royal protections and, 7, 9, 68, 109–10, 169, 173, 178–81, 185–86, 195, 198–204, 225, 229–30, 232–33, 235, 263–65; self-­government and, 104–5; status of, 71–72, 81; as tax collectors, 75; use of alcaldes apartados, 111; violence towards, 7–8, 74, 125, 168, 176–81. See also Christian Iberia Joan, King, 201, 203 Joan I, 129, 211 Joan II, 174 João II, 268 Johan III, 264 John of Valladolid, 197 Joseph, Leon, 150 Joseph ben Ferruziel (Cidellus), 66–67 Joseph ben Jacob, 284n3 Joseph ben Shoshan, 89 Joseph of Hamadan, 94, 160 Juan I, 198 Juan II (King of Aragon), 228–30, 233, 254, 264 Juan II (King of Castile), 212, 216, 234–36, 238, 252, 254 Jucé, Rabbi, 246 Juce ben Josua, 233 Judah ben Asher, 161 Judah ben Barzillay, 39–40, 45 Judah ben Eleazar, 78

337

Judah ben Solomon Ha-­Kohen, 78 Judah de la Cavalleria, 121 Judaism: in al-­Andalus, 37–47; ashmurot vigils and, 40; Christian critique of, 99–100; de-­baptism of forced converts, 221–22; Disputation of Tortosa and, 214–15; explanatory systems in, 40; Franco-­ German religious traditions and, 96; Greek philosophy and, 88; Hebrew language and, 38–39; Kabbalah and, 90, 101; Karaism and, 46–47; liturgical prayers (piyyutim), 37–40; Maimonidean controversies and, 83–88; morning blessings in, 41; Muslim associations with heresy, 30; penitential prayers (selihot), 39–40; prayer leaders and, 41–42; regional differences in, 13; relationship between individual and God, 39; religious identity and, 217–21; return of forced converts to, 173, 205–6, 211, 219–23, 298n41; role of philosophy and mysticism in, 7, 243; sacred texts in, 42–44; sectarian, 46–47; singing and, 38–39; synagogue service and, 38, 278n68; systematic theology in, 243; threats to rabbinic, 82. See also Jews; synagogues Judeo-­Arabic texts, 34, 75, 84–85 Kabbalah: ban on ecstatic, 101; Castilian, 94–96, 101; Catalonian, 94; collective Jewish essence and, 91–92, 160; dissemination of, 270; engagement with sefirot, 90, 92, 95–96; esoteric system of, 90–93, 96; intellectual culture and, 152; Jewish law and, 101; limits on teaching of, 93–94, 101, 123, 160–61, 285n17; mysticism and, 90–91, 93–95, 270; rise of Spanish, 90–96; Sefer ha-­Zohar and, 95–96; Sephardic scholarship and, 91–96, 101, 243; Torah and, 91–92, 94, 243 Kad ha-­Kemah (The Flour Jar) (Bahya ben Asher), 162 kahal (communal councils): authority of, 186; charitable funds and, 139; conflict with courtiers, 105, 130, 132; confraternities and, 139–40, 192; decision-­making in, 139; protections of, 129, 186; royal support and, 105, 130, 233. See also aljamas; communal politics Karaism, 46–47 kehillot (communities), 19, 27, 43, 128–29, 280n88

338

Index

Kingdom of Aragon. See Crown of Aragon Kingdom of León, 67, 282n29 Kingdom of Mallorca, 118 Kingdom of Portugal. See Portugal Kingdom of Valencia: anti-­Jewish violence in, 201; Black Death in, 176; Furs (legal code), 118, 229; Jewish communities in, 228; Jewish courtiers and, 119; Jewish merchants and, 147, 242; Jewish moneylending and, 135, 291n50; Jewish physicians in, 148; Jewish poverty in, 144; protection of Jews and, 172, 182; War of the Two Peters and, 189–90. See also Valencia Kitab al-­hawi (The Comprehensive Book), 45 Klein, Elka, 275n17 Languedoc, 76, 88, 90, 170 La Palma, 259 Laws of Ayllón, 209, 216, 235 León, 66–68, 127 Leon, Isaac de, 245 Leonor, Queen, 190 Liber Marie, 122 Libro de ajedrez, dados y tablas (Book of Chess, Dice, and Tables), 121 Libro de Fueros de Castilla, 109 limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) theory, 253 liturgical prayers (piyyutim), 38–40 Llerena, 258 Llull, Ramon, 96 Louis IX, 100 Lucena: divorce and, 24; Jewish elites in, 47; Jewish scholarship in, 19–20, 275n18; rabbinic responsa and, 26, 65, 282n21; rabbinic study in, 45, 279n83 Luján, Pedro de, 238 Lumbroso, Joseph, 270 Luna, Álvaro de, 216, 234–36, 252, 264 Madrigal, 255 Maghreb, 16, 56, 60, 242, 274n9 magic spells, 165–67, 294n94 Mahberet (Notebook) (Ibn Saruq), 51–53 Maimonidean controversies: anti-­ Maimonideans and, 88–89; Aristotlean thought and, 86; mysticism and, 84; values of Judaism and, 83–88, 103 Maimonides: Andalusi intellectual heritage and, 85; on Andalusi scholars in Provence,

76; Commentary on the Mishnah, 79; critique of legal scholars, 44; exile to Fez and Fustat, 55, 60–61, 76, 83; on forced conversions, 61; French rabbi attack on, 97–99; Guide for the Perplexed, The, 79, 83, 86–87, 98; impact on Andalusi Jewish history, 83; Mishneh Torah (Repetition of the Torah), 45, 87, 89, 98–99; on philosophical aspects of Judaism, 86–88, 91; Sephardic intellectual culture and, 55, 83; study of, 102, 243; translation of works into Hebrew, 78–79, 83 Málaga, 19, 260 Mallorca: anti-­Jewish riots in, 195, 201; Black Death in, 178; confraternities in, 138; escape of conversos to North Africa from, 205, 211; forced conversions and, 201, 203, 205; inquisitorial tribunals in, 259; Jewish communities in, 240; Jewish merchants and, 75, 146, 170, 242; Jewish society in, 126; maritime trade in, 146 Malmad ha-­Talmidim (Teacher of Disciples) (Anatoli), 162 Manuel I, 264, 268 manuscript illustration, 245–46 Marian miracles, 121–23 María of Castile, Queen, 230 Al-­Marrakushi, 60 Marroquí, Iuçeff (Jucef), 141 Martí, Duke, 200–203 Martí, Ramon, 197 Martín, Juan de, 258 Martínez, Ferrante, 195, 198–200, 208 Martini, Raymond, 100 Mascho, Micer Domingo, 203 maskilim, 271 Maymó, Jafuda, 232 medical practice, 148–51, 165 Melamed, Meir, 263 Mendoza, Pedro González de, 256 merchant trade: al-­Andalus (Muslim Spain) and, 25–26; Christian role in, 147; conversos and, 242, 251; long-­distance trade and, 26–27, 146–47; maritime trade, 146; Muslim role in, 147. See also Jewish merchants meshummadim (apostates), 298n34 Milagros de Nuestra Señora (Berceo), 122 Miranda de Castañar, 107 Mishnah, 42, 44. See also Talmud

Index Mishneh Torah (Repetition of the Torah) (Maimonides), 45, 87, 89, 98–99 Molina de Aragon, 142 moneylending. See credit Moreh Zedek (Teacher of Righteousness) (Alfonso de Valladolid), 100 Morillo, Miguel de, 258 Morvedre, 172, 176, 201, 223, 228, 240 Moses ben Hanokh, 15–17, 23, 25, 53 Moses de Leon, 94–95 Moses of Coucy, 161 Muhammed, 30, 48 Muhammed XII, 262 Murcia, 258 Muslim intellectual life: anti-­Judaism and, 29–30; Arabic language and, 34; Ibn Naghrilla critique of, 32; interactions with Jewish intellectuals, 29–30; religious purity and, 29 Muslim merchant traders, 147 Muslim rulers: Castilian conquest of territories, 114, 169; Jewish courtiers and, 14–15, 21, 28–32, 57; Jewish subjects and, 20, 30; status of dhimmis and, 28 Muslims: abuse of Jewish converts, 60–61; anti-­Judaism and, 29–33; interfaith relations and, 29; Jewish role in conquests, 274n4; legal references to nonbelievers, 58; moneylending and, 144, 291n50; objections to Jewish social mobility, 4, 28; relationships with Jewish community, 20–21, 27–34, 54, 60, 107; violence against Jews, 116; western movement of Jews and, 13 mysticism: Abulafia and, 101; Christian, 270; conversos and, 270; Jewish spirituality and, 7, 82, 84, 243; Kabbalah and, 90–91, 93–95, 270; secrecy around, 94 nação (nation), 269 Na Hanon, 165 Nahmanides: Commentary on the Torah, 93; as communal leader, 96–99; defense of Maimonides, 97–99; emigration to Holy Land, 94, 101; Franco-­German religious traditions and, 96; kabbalistic study and, 93–96; limits on kabbalistic teaching, 93–94, 101, 285n17; opposition to Alconstantini’s appointment, 121; public disputations and, 101, 214; sermon books and, 162; students of, 163; supercommentaries and,

339

153; synthesis of traditions, 103; on wearing of talismans, 166 Al-­Nakawa, Israel, 159–60, 162–63 Narboni, Moses, 151 Natan, Moses, 184 Navarre: alliance with Castile, 189; anti-­ Jewish riots in, 173–75; Christian administration of, 119; expulsion of Jews from, 264; Jewish exiles in, 108, 264; Jewish life in, 9, 126, 134; as part of Sepharad, 80 Netanyahu, Benzion, 298n34 New Christians. See conversos (Jewish converts) Nicholas V, Pope, 253 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 152 North Africa: Almoravid dynasty and, 57; Andalusi Jewish ties with, 21, 45, 51, 53, 75–76, 80; escape of conversos to, 205, 211, 219–21; Jews as Muslim advisors in, 15, 75; Valencian Jewish trade with, 147 Nuñes, Jacob aben, 238, 241 Or Adonai (The Light of the Lord) (Crescas), 242 Pablo de Santa María, 218 Palestine, 15, 18, 146 Pardes Rimonim (Orchard of Pomegranates) (Cordovero), 270 Peace of Almazán, 189 Pedro de Ollogoyen, 174 Pedro I, 131, 187–88, 193 Pedro of Castile, 190 Peña, Antonio de la, 261 penitential prayers (selihot), 39–40 Pere III, 120–21 Pere IV: Black Death and, 177–78; civil war and, 175–76; exotic beasts and, 142; hearth tax (fogaje) and, 191; Jewish courtiers and, 129; Jewish payments to, 169, 190; protection of Jews, 179–81, 190; punishment of attacks on Jews, 180–81; rights of Jewish communal councils, 186; War of the Two Peters and, 189–90 Perpignan, 118–19, 138, 170, 197, 209, 216 Petrus Alfonsi, 74 Picatrix (The Goal of the Wise), 96 Pichón, Yuçaf, 130 Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Fathers), 153 Plato of Tivoli, 78

340

Index

Portugal: anti-­converso sentiment, 269; anti-­ Jewish violence in, 223; Castilian alliance with, 189; conversos in, 247–48, 268; forced conversions and, 268–69; General Council of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, 269; Jewish courtiers and, 245; Jewish life in, 9, 126; Jewish migration to, 239, 263–64, 268; Jewish physicians in, 151; Kingdom of, 282n29; mass conversions and, 219; pressure from Ferdinand and Isabella to expel Jews, 264, 268 poverty: Jewish life and, 7, 22–24, 54, 57; in the Middle Ages, 276n24; religious observation and, 138–39 Provençal Jews: Arabic language and, 80; Christian hostility towards, 172; cross-­ cultural encounter, 103; cross-­cultural encounter and, 103; Greek philosophy and, 88, 97; Hebrew curriculum and, 85; Hebrew translation and, 151–52; integration in Hispano-­Jewish society, 170–73; localized governance and, 102–3; Maimonidean controversies and, 84, 86, 88; philosophical study and, 97; relationships with Andalusi Jews, 76, 104, 170 Provence: Andalusi Jewish settlement in, 76, 82, 86; cross-­cultural encounter, 103; Jewish communities in, 56, 75–76, 79, 235; Jewish culture and, 83; Jewish scholars in, 81, 83, 85, 93; Kabbalah and, 90; northern European Jewish traditions and, 86; sermon books in, 162; translation movement in, 78–81. See also Hispano-­Provençal Jews Proverbios Morales (Santob de Carrión), 152 Pugio Fidei (The Dagger of Faith) (Martí), 197 Purim, 165 Qayrawan, 21, 45, 277n38, 279n83 Qur’an, 29, 35, 49, 58, 60 Ramiro I, 70 Ramiro II, 67 Ramon Berenguer IV, 68–69, 72 Ramon de Maserata, 115 Ramon de Montcada II, 283n50 Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac), 103, 153, 281n102 Ravaya, Samuel, 296n44 Raymond of Penyafort, 100 real-­estate speculation, 145–46 Reccared I, 5

Reconquista, 56 refugees: Andalusi Jewish, 55, 60–61, 64–65, 68–69; Castilian Jews as, 260; in Christian Iberia, 6, 69, 82; conversos (Jewish converts), 219–20, 222, 251, 260; cultural integration and, 171; dedication to ‘arabiyya, 76–77; economic potential of, 82; expulsion from England and France, 170–71; integration in Hispano-­Jewish society, 170–71; in Portugal, 264, 268; Provençal Jews as, 170–73; in Provence, 6; sense of displacement and, 171–72 Refutation of Ibn Naghrilla the Jew (Ibn Hazm), 32 Revolt of the Unions, 175–76 Ribash. See Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet (Ribash) Rindfleisch massacres, 294n1 Rodrigo de Cerrato, 122 Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, 113 Ronda, 260 royal authority: expulsion edict and, 225, 248–49, 262–64; inquisitorial tribunals and, 258–60, 265; Jewish courtiers and, 31–32, 65, 69, 105–6, 119–21, 124, 131–32; Jewish loyalty towards, 68, 111, 190; kahal (communal councils) and, 105, 233; legal codes and, 118; protection of Jews, 7, 9, 72, 109–10, 169, 172–74, 178–80, 185–86, 190–91, 195, 198–204, 225, 229, 233, 235, 264–65; rebellion against, 174, 181 Saadia Gaon, 35–36, 52 Saba, Abraham, 245 sacred texts: Andalusi intellectual heritage and, 85–86; expansion of study of, 152; Jewish subcultures and, 85–86; Judaism and, 42–43; kabbalists and, 93; Maimonidean controversies and, 103; Sephardic approach to, 84–85, 270; Talmud as, 43–44, 100; Torah as, 93; translation into Hebrew, 84–85; translation movement and, 79–80 Salamanca, 127, 238–39 Salomo, Cresques, 184 Samarell, Jucef, 183 Samuel ben Judah, 151–52 Sánchez-­Albornoz, Claudio, 273n2 Sancho III, 69 Sancho IV, 187 Sancho Ramírez, 66, 69 Santa María, Pablo de, 211–12

Index Santa María de Cartagena, Alonso, 212 Santángel, Jaime Martinez, 260 Santob de Carrión, 152 Saragossa: Alconstantini as head rabbi in, 120–21; Cefarim brotherhood, 140; confraternities in, 139–40, 290n34; expulsion of Jews from, 260–61; factionalism and, 231–32; forced conversions in, 206; francos (tax-­exempt), 133; inquisitorial tribunals in, 259–60; Jewish artisans in, 142; Jewish brokers in, 147; Jewish communities in, 104, 128, 228–29, 235; Jewish merchants and, 26, 67; Jewish physicians in, 148; Jewish social upheaval in, 138; political reform in, 232; prominent families with royal ties, 135; religious life and, 246; resistance to the Inquisition in, 259–60; royal intervention in Jewish communal affairs, 233; translation movement in, 78 Saragossa circle, 247 Sarmiento, Pedro, 252–54 Scheindlin, Raymond P., 274n3 Scroll of Esther, 165 Secretum Secretorum (Secret of Secrets), 96 Sefer ha-­Halakhot (The Book of Jewish Laws), 45 Sefer ha-­‘Ikkarim (The Book of Principles) (Albo), 242 Sefer ha-­Ittim (Book of the Seasons), 45 Sefer ha-­Madda (Book of Knowledge) (Maimonides), 87, 98 Sefer ha-­meshiv (The Book of the Answering Angel), 243 Sefer ha-­Qabbalah (Book of Tradition) (Ibn Daud), 16 Sefer ha-­Zohar (The Book of Splendor), 95–96 sefirot, 90, 92, 95–96 Segorbe, 144 Segovia, 127 Semana Santa (Holy Week), 115, 174–75, 181, 184–85, 191 Seneor, Abraham, 238, 246, 251, 262–63 Seneor, Solomon, 246 Sentencia-­Estatuto, 253 Sepharad: Christian territories as, 80; as golden age of Jewish history, 1, 3, 12, 14, 36–37; Jewish life in, 1, 12, 47 Sephardic Jews: biblical exegesis and, 35–36; contrasting views of, 2, 273n1; conversos and, 268; cultural identity and, 7, 47–49, 269–71, 279n88; decline in Torah study

341

and, 41; displacement and transience in, 171, 271; as exiles of Jerusalem, 47–50, 280n102; grammatical study and, 53, 280n102; Hebrew language and, 34–35, 49; historical information on, 12–13, 273n2; independence from Baghdadi rabbis, 275n14; intellectual culture and, 49–54, 247, 271; internal dynamics of, 6–7; nação (nation), 269; pride in lineage, 247–48; in Provence, 75–76; rabbinic responsa and, 66; socioeconomic differences and, 54; synthesis of traditions and, 103; Talmud and applied law, 45–46, 86, 279n83. See also Andalusi Jews Sephardim. See Sephardic Jews Sepúlveda, 254 Seville: anti-­converso riots in, 254; anti-­ Jewish violence in, 195, 199; Castilian conquest of, 114; dhimmi status and, 59; expulsion of Jews from, 260; inquisitorial tribunals in, 258; Jewish communities in, 19, 127–28, 226; prominent families with royal ties, 135 Shalom, Abraham, 243 Shame of the Gentiles (Honoratus de Bonafide), 218 Shem Tov Ardutiel, 152 Shem Tov family, 243 Shepherd’s Crusade (Pastoureaux), 172–74 Sherira, Rabbi, 16 Shomre Holim societies, 138 Sibili, Joan, 136 Siete Partidas, Las, 113–14, 117–18, 121 Sigüenza, 258 Sijilmasa, 62 Sinagoga dels Francesos (Scola Gallorum), 171 Sixtus IV, Pope, 256–59 social welfare, 137–38, 140, 290n29 Soifer Irish, Maya, 291n52 Solomon ben Isaac. See Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac) Spain: expulsion of Jews from, 5, 9, 55, 126, 225, 248–49, 260–64, 267; Holy Office in, 259–60; Jewish communities in, 2, 271; Jewish life in, vi, vii, 1–3, 5–9, 11; nationalism and, 247, 301n50; papal support for, 70; political factionalism and, 231; Reconquista and, 56; Tenth–Twelfth Centuries map, vi; Thirteenth–Fifteenth Centuries map, vii; Visigothic, 5–6, 13, 274n4. See also al-­ Andalus (Muslim Spain); Inquisition

342

Index

Spanish Inquisition. See Inquisition St. John of the Cross, 270 “Story of the Four Captives” (Ibn Daud), 16, 64, 279n83 St. Teresa of Ávila, 270 Suárez Fernández, Luis, 273n1, 301n43 Sufi texts, 95 supercommentaries, 152–53, 292n69 synagogues: adjudication of Jewish law and, 153; in Christian Iberia, 104, 114–15, 131; Christian missionizing in, 100, 169; destruction of, 199; Hebrew language and, 38–39; Jewish religious life and, 38–39, 41–42, 153–54, 278n68; Jewish women and, 165; liturgical prayers (piyyutim) and, 38; moral behavior and, 157–58; morning blessings in, 41; precept of tefillin in, 157, 293n74; selection of cantors, 154–57 Tabula Antidotarii (Blaise), 171 taifas (independent principalities), 22, 31, 56–57, 66, 78 takkanot, 183–86, 194, 206, 236–38 Talavera, Juan de, 251 Tale of Adam and Eve, The (Toldot Adam ve-­ Hava) (Yeruham ben Meshullam), 164 Talmud: Ashkenazic study practice, 152; Christian polemics and, 197; commentaries on, 103, 152–53, 292n69; conversos (Jewish converts) on, 214; European Jewish interpretations of, 86; Iyyun Sefardi (“Sephardic speculation”), 244–45; Jewish law and, 36, 42–46, 86; Maimonidean controversies and, 87; papal order against, 100; philosophical aspects of, 86; public disputations and, 100–101; rabbinic tradition and, 87; on religious identity, 219; study of, 42–44, 152–53 Tam, Rabbenu, 281n102 Tamaño, Mosé, 234 Tarazona, 176, 229 Tarragona, 148, 178, 203, 229, 244, 275n18 Tàrrega, 179–81, 194, 254 tefillin, 157, 293n74 Temple of Jerusalem, 40 Tenorio, Pedro, 132 Teruel, 176, 259–61 Todros ben Judah Abulafia, 105 Toledo: anti-­Jewish rebellion in, 252–54; Ashkenazi rabbinic dynasty at, 103–4;

attacks on Jews, 187; Christian conquest of, 56, 66, 81; inquisitorial tribunals in, 258; Jewish communities in, 19, 73, 76, 107, 127–28, 226; Jewish courtiers in, 131; Jewish scholars in, 170, 244; Judeo-­Arabic scholarship in, 78; limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) theory in, 253; massacre of Jews in, 74; prominent families with royal ties, 135; ransoming of captives in, 23; segregation of Jews in, 257; stature of aljama in, 227; Talmud and, 45 Torah: commentaries of Rashi on, 103; Jewish religious life and, 38–41, 94; Kabbalah and, 91–92, 94, 161, 243, 270; legal aspects of, 44; philosophical aspects of, 86–89 Torquemada, Juan de, 253 Torquemada, Tomás de, 259 Tortosa, 67–68, 72, 142. See also Disputation of Tortosa Transito synagogue, 131 Treatise on Pestilential Fevers and Other Kinds of Fevers (Caslari), 182–83 Tudela, 72–73, 160, 174, 228, 260 Tzarfat, 86 Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba, 13–14, 16, 18–20, 22, 275n10 Urban II, Pope, 70 Valencia: aljama governance in, 186; anti-­ Jewish violence in, 176, 195, 200, 203; confederacy of aljamas in, 184; contact between Jews and conversos in, 208–9; escape of conversos to North Africa from, 206, 211; forced conversions in, 206; inquisitorial tribunals in, 259; Jewish communities in, 128, 211, 235, 240; Jewish merchants and, 147, 242; Jewish physicians in, 148; ransoming of captive, 23; resistance to the Inquisition in, 260; royal protections and, 141. See also Kingdom of Valencia Valensi, Samuel, 245 Valladolid, 127, 236, 238, 258 Valmaseda, 261 Vic, 106, 115 Vidal de la Cavalleria (Vidal ben Lavi), 215, 231 Villalón, 300n30 violence: anti-­converso, 254, 269; anti-­Jewish riots (1066), 19, 33; anti-­Jewish riots

Index (1328), 173–75, 179, 294n11; anti-­Jewish riots (1391), 8, 125–26, 198–205, 223, 235, 244; during Castile civil war, 187–88, 193; cataclysmic events and, 194; destruction of debt records in, 192, 202; forced conversions and, 195–205, 209; foreign mercenaries and, 188, 193, 202, 296n35; Holy Week aggression, 115–16, 174–75, 184; within Jewish communities, 136–37, 232; Jewish life and, 22–24; Jewish merchants and, 276n24; against Jews during Black Death, 125, 168, 176–82, 184–85, 193–94, 294n1, 295n18; Montclus massacres, 172; Rindfleisch and Armleder massacres, 294n1; ritualized, 121; royal efforts to protect Jews, 173, 178–81; Shepherd’s Crusade (Pastoureaux) rioting, 172–74; social and political hierarchies and, 33–34; women and, 137 Visigothic Spain, 5–6, 13, 67, 196, 274n4 visitadores, 257 War of the Two Peters, 189–90, 193

343

Xambell, Jacob, 141 Ya’ir Nativ (Enlightener of the Path) (Ibn Abbas), 86 Yavetz, Joseph, 243 Yeruham ben Meshullam, 164 yeshivot, 127, 244–45 Yesod Mora (Ibn Ezra), 85 Yizhari, Mattathias, 214 Yom Kippur, 249, 293n78 Yom Tov Ishbili, 103 Zag de la Maleha, 112, 131 Zamora: aljama in, 227, 241; anti-­Jewish sentiment in, 261; intellectual culture and, 107, 244; Jewish communities in, 127, 301n43; Jewish financial difficulties in, 106; Portuguese attacks on, 254; rabbinic study in, 227, 245 Zamora, Johan de, 245 Zirid dynasty, 31 Zsom, Dora, 298n34