Religion Compass 3/1 (2009): 7285, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00119.

Convivencia in Medieval Spain: A Brief History of an Idea

Kenneth Baxter Wolf*
Pomona College

Abstract

Convivencia refers to the coexistence of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities in medieval Spain and by extension the cultural interaction and exchange fostered by such proximity. The term first appeared as part of a controversial thesis about Spanish historical identity advanced by Amrico Castro in 1948. Since then interest in the idea of convivencia has spread, fueled in part by increased attention to multi-culturalism and rising concern about religiously framed acts of violence. The application of social scientific models has gone a long way toward clarifying the mechanisms of acculturation at work in medieval Spain and tempering the tendency to romanticize convivencia.

Convivencia refers to the coexistence of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities in medieval Spain and by extension the cultural interaction and exchange fostered by such proximity. While it first emerged as part of a famous debate about Spanish historical identity that punctuated the Franco years, the notion that these three religious communities got along better in medieval Spain than they did at other times and in other places is older than that. The nineteenth century witnessed both the Romantic fascination with Muslim Spain epitomized by Washington Irving and the more scholarly projects of French and Spanish Arabists, who saw in the cosmopolitan culture of Muslim Spain the antithesis of Christian Spain, past and present (Lpez-Lzaro unpublished, p. 17). At the same time, Jews in Central Europe who were fascinated by the heights achieved by their Sephardic counterparts in medieval Spain tended to credit, among other factors, an unusually high level of tolerance on the part of the Andalusian authorities. True or not, such claims helped Jewish apologists put in greater relief the poor track record of modern European governments in the years preceding emancipation (Cohen 1991). It was the Spanish philologist and literary historian Amrico Castro (18851972) who first used the term convivencia as part of the controversial theory about Spanish cultural identity that he launched in his Espaa en su historia: cristianos, moros, y judos (Buenos Aires, 1948).1 Like so many
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other Spanish intellectuals grappling with the legacy of the Generation of 1898, Castro was intent on explaining the enigma of modern Spain, which seemed at the time so hopelessly out of step with the rest of Europe (Castro 1948, pp. 1724; Gmez-Martnez 1975, pp. 1333). But unlike other peninsular scholars, Castro refused to evaluate Spanish history using criteria such as political liberalism or technological innovation that had been chosen with more successful countries like France, England, and Germany in mind (Araya Goubet 1976, pp. 414, 50). Having identified what he saw as a particularly Spanish propensity for self-doubt and insecurity despite a history filled with singularly impressive achievements, Castro turned to the past in an effort to lay bare its roots. His search led him to posit the existence of a distinctively Spanish structure of life (estructura vital or morada vital ) that informed modern Spanish history, a mesh of interconnected values that, Castro came to believe, was the product of the unique blending of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultural elements that took place between the late eleventh and the late fourteenth centuries2 (Castro 1948, pp. 23, 256, 39; Castro 1954, pp. 31, 334, 46, 4, n. 2; Araya Goubet 1976, pp. 546). The bulk of Castros magnum opus is dedicated to a series of micro-studies meant to illustrate the pervasiveness of Andalusian Muslim and Jewish influence on Castilian culture. Castro predictably gave pride of place to language and literature, which, as far as he was concerned, provided the best access to the heart and soul of Spanish identity, but he by no means limited himself to this field. Beyond surveying the Arabisms that made their way into the Castilian language, Castro weighed cultural adoptions and adaptations of all kinds, including the origins of idea of the hidalgo, the rise of the military orders, and the distinctive role of the church in Spain. Most famously, Castro directed his readers attention to the rise of Santiago Matamoros (Moor-Slayer), an anomalous cult that he argued would have been unimaginable had Spain not been submerged by Islam and in need of a rallying point that matched the intensity of the Muslim devotion to Muhammad (Castro 1948, pp. 108, 1268; Gonzlez-Lpez 1976, pp. 91110). The cult of Santiago Matamoros was particularly important for Castro, because it epitomized the effect that proximity to Islam had on the germination of a peculiarly Spanish form of Christianity fused with nationality. At the same time, however, Castro made much of what he considered to be a Hispano-Muslim propensity at least before the rise of the Almoravids and Almohads for tolerance vis--vis their Christian and Jewish subjects, and the positive, if short-term, effect that this had on later Christian populations that counted the virulently anti-Jewish Visigoths among its ancestors (Castro 1948, pp. 208, 211; Castro 1977, p. 196). As Castro saw it, the cultural imprint left by the Muslims and Jews in Spain was as ambivalent as it was deep. The Spanish Christians involved in the reconquista remained in awe of the superior Islamic and Jewish cultures even while they were subjecting Muslims and Jews to their dominion, and it was
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precisely this inherent contradiction that left its indelible mark on the national character of Spain (Castro 1948, pp. 48, 512, 105, 600). The exaggerated sense of religious identity combined with a hunger for lordship may have propelled the New World conquests, but it also fueled the expulsions of the Jews and Muslims and the establishment of the Inquisition, which in turn inhibited the development of speculative, secular thought as well as technological innovation. Castros thesis, which gave Muslims and Jews such a central role in the formation of Spanish identity,3 provoked a great deal of controversy, eliciting a famous rebuttal from Claudio Snchez-Albornoz (18931984), a Spanish historian who, like Castro, wrote in exile. In his monumental Espaa: Un enigma histrico (Buenos Aires, 1956), Snchez-Albornoz reiterated and elaborated his more traditional thesis,4 claiming, among other things, that the distinctive Spanish identity homo hispanus had been forged long before the arrival of the Muslims, and that the Islamic presence, a fundamentally antagonistic one, could have added nothing of substance to it. On the contrary, the supposed Islamification of Spain was really more of a Hispanification of western Islam, as the original invaders were demographically and culturally absorbed by their subjects. Nevertheless, the proximity of Islam over the course of eight formative centuries took its toll, not only dividing Spain geographically but forcing its legitimate inhabitants to expend so much energy on the reconquest of Spain and ultimately on the conquest of America that their development as a European nation was stunted. In a series of revised editions to his original work, Castro rebutted Snchez-Albornozs biologically inspired notion that cultural genotypes were essentially impervious to ephemeral challenges that come from contact with other cultures, a notion that had prevented Snchez-Albornoz from crediting Islam and Judaism with a more direct role in the formation of Spanish identity. As far as Castro was concerned, it was never a question of race. The Spanish fashioned themselves within and over the course of the history of their experience, wrote Castro (Castro 1948, p. 44; italics my own), and prior to the period of convivencia, one cannot meaningfully refer to the inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula as Spaniards at all. It simply made no sense to follow the curve of Hispanicity from Seneca to Unamuno, as Snchez-Albornoz thought he could do, ignoring key Islamic and Jewish contributions along the way (Araya Goubet 1976, pp. 5961; Monroe 1976, pp. 6971; Glick 1979, p. 9). The debate inspired by these two Spanish luminaries managed to survive both Castros death in 1972 and Francos in 1975.5 But with the ebb of such antiquated historical notions as national character and the speed of Spains integration into Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, the debate quickly lost its raison dtre. There simply was no obvious Spanish enigma to explain anymore. Instead of treating the Islamic presence as an obstacle to Spanish participation in the modern world, historians began to see it as the sine qua non of peninsular multiculturalism, Spains most distinctive
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contribution to medieval European history. This radical change in historical climate ensured that Castros convivencia would not only survive but thrive as a historiographical concept; though not without major modification. I will be focusing here primarily on Anglophone treatments of convivencia, Castros thesis having had a profound effect on American and British Hispanists.6 Even before Francos death, scholars inspired by Castro saw potential in the idea of convivencia once it had been freed from the constraints of such a complex, intramural debate on Spanish identity.7 In a seminal article, Acculturation as an Explanatory Concept in Spanish History (Glick & Pi-Sunyer 1969), Thomas Glick and Oriol Pi-Sunyer applauded Castros determination to address cultural blending in medieval Spain, but lamented his lack of exposure to the anthropological theories that would have allowed him to identify the mechanisms of acculturation that actually made convivencia work. Siding with Castro in his assault on the eternal Spain school represented by Snchez-Albornoz, they argued that cultures, far from being monolithic and static, are subject to constant reconfiguration, much of which is driven by their contact with and permeability to other cultures. From their anthropological vantage point, Glick and Pi-Sunyer saw Castros convivencia as a form of stabilized pluralism, a stage of arrested fusion or incomplete assimilation that was inherently unstable, at best a modus vivendi, not an end of the values of either bloc (Glick & Pi-Sunyer 1969, p. 153). Hence, the inevitability of the dramatic shift from the convivencia of medieval Spain to the hostility, assimilation, and finally expulsion of the minority by the dominant culture that characterized late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain. From the perspective of Glick and Pi-Sunyer, Spanish history lent itself particularly well to a historical application of anthropological theory precisely because it offered a whole range of contact situations, some essentially destructive (resulting from the overweening dominance of one of the two cultures), but others profoundly constructive (in periods when the forces of each were more nearly equal) (Glick & Pi-Sunyer 1969, p. 141). A decade later, Thomas Glicks magnum opus on the subject of convivencia appeared under the unassuming title Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Glick 1979). With comparative chapters on agriculture and colonization, urbanization and commerce, social structure and ethnic relations, Glick laid a firm foundation for his theories about the movement of ideas (primarily technological and scientific) between Muslims and Christians from the eighth through the thirteenth centuries. The end result was a nuanced and sophisticated appreciation of the overlapping political, economic, social, and cultural factors that combined in unexpected ways to make relations between the three religious communities and their various subsets so complicated. Along the way, Glick continued to chip away at some of the more antiquated assumptions of traditional Spanish historiography, challenging, in particular, the ideas that ethnic conflict
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and cultural diffusion are mutually exclusive phenomena and that, with large-scale indigenous conversion to Islam in the tenth century, somehow al-Andalus became less Islamic (Glick 1979, pp. 165, 1857). At the same time, he warned against making more out of the Andalusian reputation for tolerance than the evidence could support. For example, he noted that while Muslim authorities allowed subject Christian and Jewish communities a remarkable degree of autonomy as far as their own internal affairs were concerned, they did this primarily because they were concerned about the possibility of contamination of their own religious community through excessive contact with Christians and Jews. The same was true, mutatis mutandis, of the Christian authorities and their relationship with Jews and subject Muslims. As Glick observed, the communal autonomy of these groups, often represented as the very symbol of tolerance, was in fact the institutional expression of ethnocentric norms which held such groups in abhorrence, as tolerated but alien citizens who were not to share in social life on the same basis as members of the dominant religion (Glick 1979, p. 174). Glicks attempt to build a solid historical and anthropological foundation for the study of convivencia as a whole has been superseded only by a recently revised and expanded edition of the same book. In the meantime, many other scholars have applied themselves to more focused studies of particular aspects of ChristianMuslimJewish interaction and acculturation in medieval Spain. Some of these works approach the subject from a particular disciplinary perspective, such as Mara Rosa Menocals The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Menocal 1990), which considers the evidence for Hispano-Arab influence on the medieval troubadour tradition. Others consider a wider range of issues raised by convivencia but restrict their attention to a particular region, as in the case of Brian Catlos The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon, 10501300 (Catlos 2004), and Robert Burns Muslims Christians, and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: Societies in Symbiosis (Burns 1984). Some, like Kenneth Baxter Wolf s Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain (Wolf, 1988) and Jessica Coopes The Martyrs of Crboba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion (Coope 1995), seek to unpack a single revealing moment in convivencia history. Others, such as Roger Collins Early Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity, 4001000 (Collins 1981) and Angus MacKays Spain in the Middle Ages: from Frontier to Empire, 10001500 (MacKay 1977), cover broad sweeps of Spanish history but give convivencia a leading role in the drama. The easiest way to get a sense for the range of scholarly interest pertaining to convivencia is to consult the proceedings of one of the many congresses dedicated to the subject over the past 20 years: Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain (Mann et al. 1992); Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Interaction and Cultural Change (Meyerson 1999); Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict and Coexistence (Collins & Goodman
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2002); and Jews, Muslims and Christians in and around the Crown of Aragon: Essays in Honour of Professor Elena Lourie (Hames 2004). Taken together, these more focused studies have added immeasurably to our understanding of the many and complex dimensions of medieval Spanish pluralism. But at the same time they have had the effect of diverting attention away from the big picture: the significance and nature of convivencia as a whole. For broader, more overarching treatments of the idea of convivencia one is left, for the most part, with works written for more popular consumption. Until September 11, 2001, it was the formation of the state of Israel that inspired the bulk of published opinions on this subject. Since that time Arab commentators have tended to subscribe to rosier views of Andalusian convivencia than their Israeli counterparts, who have been more inclined to portray the history of MuslimJewish relations as troubled from the time of Muhammad, offering little real hope of convivencia, past or present (Cohen 1991, p. 56). Since 9/11, concerns about fundamentalist Islam and its relationship to the West have inspired a number of studies of medieval Spain, intent on exploring and assessing its reputation for convivencia. The most popular to date has been Mara Rosa Menocals The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Menocal 2002). The authors stated objective was to put to rest the simplistic perspectives of Spanish history that had reduced it to a prolonged military struggle for control of the peninsula, but at the same time to avoid replacing older clichs with another equally simplistic one; to wit, that medieval Spain was some sort of haven of religious tolerance (Menocal 2002, p. 13). Although the subtitle of her book might lead a reader to think that Menocal had fallen into the very trap that she was trying to avoid, what she actually did with the topic is considerably more nuanced. Menocals thesis is that the unusual level of tolerance of religious difference that seemed to characterize the Umayyad period of Andalusian history (7561031) was built not so much on guarantees of religious freedoms comparable to those we would expect in a modern tolerant state, but on the often unconscious acceptance that contradictions within oneself, as well as within ones culture could be positive and productive (Menocal 2002, p. 11). In other words, the dominant Andalusian culture, though Islamic, was big enough and apparently confident enough to contain many non-Islamic, and even un-Islamic, elements within in. Menocal thesis seems to have grown out of the simple observation that Arabic, long before becoming the holy language of the Quran, had served as the vehicle for a sophisticated secular poetic tradition. As Islam spread, so did Arabic, bringing with it a highly developed Arabic literary culture that could and did appeal to Muslims and non-Muslims alike (Menocal 2002, pp. 613, 758). Extrapolating from this Islamic receptivity to pre-Islamic literary culture, Menocal painted the Muslim
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world as one that was originally open to contradictions of all types, as evidenced, on the one hand, by the translation into Arabic of Greek philosophy, and on the other, by the positive working relationships cultivated with non-Muslims. This was particularly true of the Umayyad dynasty that, deprived of its Damascus-based caliphate in 750, remade itself in Crdoba in 756. In Menocals own words, the Umayyads . . . created a universe of Muslims where piety and observance were not seen as inimical to an intellectual and secular life and society (Menocal 2002, p. 87). Though the Umayyads lasted only until the civil wars of the early eleventh century, their ecumenical attitude outlived them and actually spread across Muslim Spain during the period of the Taifa kingdoms and then beyond the boundaries of al-Andalus altogether into Christian Europe. Using a series of roughly chronological historical vignettes, Menocal traced and illustrated the proliferation of this cultural open-mindedness. Most of her chapters consider the careers of key individuals like Samuel ibn Nagrila, the great Jewish poet and vizier of the Taifa kingdom of Granada; Petrus Alfonsi, the converted Jew who introduced the English court of Henry I to the wonders of Arab science; Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Cluny who was responsible for overseeing the first Latin translation of the Quran; and Thomas Aquinas, whose controversial synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy was built of the foundations laid by Averroes and Maimonides. As in the case of Castros book, literature holds pride of place in Menocals as a marker of creative exchange. It was the Arabic tradition of secular poetry that triggered the golden age of Hebrew poets in al-Andalus, and, in a vernacular form, infiltrated Provence, helping to shape the troubadour tradition. Moreover, the rich body of framed tales that Petrus Alfonsi introduced to the Latin world, tales that would inspire Boccaccio and Chaucer, were derived from Arab sources. In the books epilogue, Menocal finally posed the big question that her study begs: How and why does a culture of tolerance fall apart? (Menocal 2002, p. 266). Her answer was a traditional one, pointing a finger at the invasions of the fundamentalist Almoravids and Almohads of Morocco as well as the importation of crusade ideologies from transpyrenean Europe. But rather than dwelling on the demise of convivencia, Menocal invited her readers to consider the shards of tolerance visible in the midst of later events that would normally suggest just the opposite, such as the establishment of the Inquisition and the fall of Granada. Menocal had intended the book to end there, but the events of 9/11 prompted her to write a postcript, one that suggests that she might have written a very different book had she known what was coming. I had some weeks before [9/11] finished writing this book, an account of and tribute to the culture of tolerance brought to Europe by the Umayyads. But this book is also necessarily an account of the forces of intolerance that were always present and ultimately triumphed (Menocal 2002, p. 282). Menocal ultimately resisted the
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temptation to go back and mute the books optimism in light of the tragedy, perhaps sensing that what her audience would need most after 9/11 would be a reminder of a time when religious difference did not necessarily translate into religious violence. The task of reconsidering convivencia from the other, darker side of 9/11 fell to Chris Lowney, the author of A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain (Lowney 2005). Picking up where Menocals postcript left off, Lowneys preface invokes the bombings of the commuter trains that shook Madrid and the world on March 11, 2004. Asking himself what might be learned from the history of medieval Spain to help him cope with the tragedies in Madrid and New York, Lowney arrived at a much more sober assessment of the culture of tolerance than Menocals. Despite the fact that medieval Spaniards were tossed by the Muslim conquest into an ocean of clashing religious cultures and were utterly ill-equipped by modern standards to navigate such uncharted waters, they somehow accommodated each others beliefs and lifestyles in ways that humanitys later generations have often been hard-pressed to match . . . (Lowney 2005, p. 8). The key to their success: they had no choice. Uncomfortable necessity, rather than some higher-minded ideal of tolerance, first spurred the accommodation that scholars hail as Spains era of convivencia (Lowney 2005, p. 189). Lowneys book is an attempt to illustrate this point. Lowneys consideration of Fernando IIIs relations with the Jews of Castile serves to illustrate his general view that unadorned pragmatism drove convivencia. When the papacy decried the damnable mixing of Christians with non-Christians and insisted that Jews be made to wear badges, Fernando refused to comply. In his correspondence with the pope, observes Lowney, there is no lofty human rights rhetoric . . . nor does he protest that stigmatizing dress would fundamentally demean the Jews. The monarchs brand of religious tolerance features no paean to cultural diversity and issues no idyllic appeal for interfaith dialogue. Indeed, one senses that he might willingly enough have subjected the Jews to the humiliation had he been certain of preserving their tax revenues and commercial savvy (Lowney 2005, p. 201). For Lowney, Fernandos tomb, placed in the newly reconsecrated mosque of Seville, testified to the inherent contradictions of medieval kingship exercised within a pluralistic society. It was chiseled in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Castilian, as if celebrating the very diversity of his kingdom, yet its words tell a different story, praising the king who conquered all Spain . . . who broke and destroyed all his enemies (Lowney 2005, p. 197). One of Lowneys more illuminating vignettes considers the demographics of frontier towns, where Christians were in precariously short supply and Jewish and Muslim settlement was encouraged by the monarchy. Local documentation in one such town describes the building a common oven, in another the negotiation of mutual water rights, and in a third shared
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access to bath houses, all of which speak to ideology being trumped by practicality. As Lowney made clear, these Jews, Muslims, and Christians did not purposely seek each others company to build a richer common life. Indeed, each community typically preferred to segregate itself where circumstances allowed (Lowney 2005, p. 204). But in frontier towns where populations were low and mixed, there was simply no choice but to work together. Herein lies the intelligence of Lowneys approach, a realistic consideration of the specific and often less-than-noble circumstances that lay behind each highly touted instance of convivencia. Again and again the reader is reminded that tolerance as a virtue in the modern sense of the term simply did not enter the picture in medieval Spain. As Lowney summarized, tolerance may be regarded as a value in its own right, a means of securing peace in a mixed society, or a useful expedient to trade. Medieval Spains particular recipe for tolerance relied on the latter two ingredients rather than the first (Lowney 2005, p. 225). When tolerance is the product of such pragmatic considerations, it is, of course, highly vulnerable to changes in political and economic circumstances. Given the progress of the reconquista and the steady increase in power of the Christian kingdoms, it was only a matter of time before this type of tolerance would give way to its opposite: pragmatic intolerance. After Alfonso X, whose reign marked for Lowney the twilight of convivencia, circumstances conspired to undercut peaceful coexistence in Spain. As an ascendant, ever more dominant Christian Spain turned into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, tolerance seemed less necessary and less useful. Spain no longer needed to balance the needs and interests of its religious minorities to secure its peace, prosperity, or borders (Lowney 2005, p. 225). The newfound power of the Catholic Monarchs, combining in one court the resources of Castile and Aragon, predictably manifested itself in the establishment of the royal Inquisition, the conquest of Granada, and the expulsion of the Jews. Nor was this new intolerance confined to the peoples of the peninsula, as Spain took its newfound power and quest for homogeneity to the New World (Lowney 2005, p. 256). The authors conclusion in a nutshell: Medieval Spain offers no facile lessons learned. Alternatively romanticized and demonized by historians, Spain was neither utopia nor dystopia but a bit of both, often at the very same moment in the actions of any one conflicted person (Lowney 2005, p. 10). Yet in this unusual frontier context, Christians and Muslims built a shared life and in the process left humanitys later generations a lesson about the capacity of ordinary humans to give priority to what unites them rather than what divides them (Lowney 2005, p. 197). What did Lowney expect his readers to do with that lesson? The globe has become one of those medieval Andalusian villages, where we buy from and sell to each other, brush against one another in streets and alleys, marvel at or recoil from each others beliefs and habits . . . (Lowney 2005, p. 260).
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The key question for him is, what will we make of our new medieval Spain? Although this would seem to imply that we have a choice in the matter, the book actually suggests otherwise. The tolerance of medieval Spain was built, after all, not on any collective commitment to be more tolerant but on the pragmatic realities of day-to-day interaction in a world where people were forced by circumstance to cooperate with one another. Lowneys more pragmatic and sober approach to convivencia has the advantage of capturing the post-9/11 mood, while at the same time remaining true to the best scholarship in the field, scholarship that, like Glicks, has resisted the temptation to romanticize the idea of convivencia and has done so by emphasizing the more pragmatic ingredients of its historical context. Mark Meyerson did just that in The Muslims of Valencia in the Age of Fernando and Isabel: Between Coexistence and Crusade (Berkeley, University of California, 1991), where he explored the economic foundations of convivencia, showing how potential violence between groups could be indefinitely forestalled by the interpersonal dynamics of the marketplace (Meyerson 1991, p. 271). Considered from this perspective, cooperation and conflict become two sides of the same anthropological coin. The wisdom of this observation is no more evident than in David Nirenburgs Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996). Nirenberg saw no reason why convivencia need designate only harmonious coexistence (Nirenberg 1996, p. 8), and set out to show how the less harmonious moments in inter-community relations, moments that have traditionally been considered the antitheses of convivencia, even harbingers of its ultimate demise, could actually contribute to the social cohesion that enabled the more positive manifestations of convivencia. His careful reconsideration of ritualized stoning of Jews during Holy Week, for instance, led him to conclude that this clerical reenacting of foundational historical narratives, reinforcing of boundaries between groups, and ritualization of sacrificial violence all contributed to conditions that made possible the continued existence of Jews in a Christian society (Nirenberg 1996, p. 228). In other words, regular, socially constructive forms of violence created a context within which socially destructive forms of violence could be the rare exception rather than the rule, thus taking the pressure off of daily interactions in the marketplace and on the street. Jonathan Rays study of Jewish communities living on the thirteenthcentury Castilian frontier led him to offer his own reflections on the idea of convivencia and its limitations. As he pointed out, this term has been embraced and distorted by an ever-widening group of academics, journalists, and politicians, a phenomenon that increasingly challenges historians of medieval Spain to return convivencia to its original context (Ray 2006, p. 1). To this end, Ray attempted to reconstruct how Spanish Jews themselves experienced their relationship with their host societies, Muslim and Christian. He addressed this question by considering, first of all, the
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responses of contemporary Jewish authorities to high points in the history of convivencia, noting that those instances of acculturation that most satisfy our longing for a more ecumenical world were anathema to the religious authorities of the time, whose task was to maintain the boundaries between the traditions. Second, Ray considered some of the ways in which individual Jews navigated between the various boundaries of identity in Iberian culture and concluded that the ability and willingness of Iberian Jews to construct identities that transcended the limits of their religious communities complicated the notion of convivencia as a function of purely of group dynamics (Ray 2006, pp. 4, 12). In short, Ray problematized convivencia by reminding us that medieval Jewish leaders were not as enamored of the ecumenical moments in their lives as modern observers are. Yet despite this official position, individual Jews participated in their host societies in all kinds of ways, expressing a whole range of identities, only some of which had anything to do with their religious affiliation. Fabio Lpez-Lzaros as-yet unpublished study of al-Andalus as an idea in early modern and modern history is also relevant in this regard. The Lachrymose and Celebratory Discourses of al-Andalus in European and Islamic Cultures considers the full spectrum of modern distortions of the image of al-Andalus as products of very specific political contexts. The Spanish Arabists whose encomiums to culture in Muslim Spain exposed the shortcomings of its Christian counterpart and, by extension, disparaged the conservative governments of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain provide one example of this process (Lpez-Lzaro unpublished, p. 17). Another is the manipulation of convivencia as a post-colonial construct to smooth over the rough spots that have remained since liberation as well as to delegitimize modern Islamic anti-Western fundamentalism (LpezLzaro unpublished, pp. 23, 26, 41). Lpez-Lzaros prescription for transcending such uni-cultural uses of al-Andalus boils down to correcting the mirage (however real) of Andalusi/Spanish trichotomous convivencia (Lpez-Lzaro unpublished, p. 2). To do this, he suggests that the idea of convivencia be balanced with examples of disvivencia; that is, with an appreciation of how Andalusi hybridity threatened Christian and Muslim identities. With this corrective in mind, Lpez-Lzaro credits modern Spanish scholars like Serafn Fanjul (2000) with exposing the myth of Andalusian tolerance that the Spanish government would have their citizens embrace as a civics lesson for the twenty-first century (Lpez-Lzaro unpublished, pp. 9, 457). Although Spaniards have traditionally found the emphasis on convivencia refreshing after centuries of scrutiny inspired by the Inquisition and the conquest of the Americas, Fanjuls ideas have considerable traction in a Spain recently preoccupied with Islamic extremism and African immigration (Lpez-Lzaro unpublished, pp. 12, 14). As Glick and Pi-Sunyer observed almost 40 years ago, the first debate over convivencia said as much about Spanish historiography in the 1950s
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and 1960s as it did about Spanish pluralism in the Middle Ages. Castro and Snchez-Albornoz were both guilty of reconstructing a Spanish past through the perspective of their own contemporary culture, a culture that is at least in part a product of the events and conditions which form the subject of their investigations (Glick & Pi-Sunyer 1969, p. 136). It is useful to remind ourselves, as we consider the present and future of convivencia as an idea in the post-Franco era, that modern scholars are no more immune to the snares of such pre-structuring than Castro and Snchez-Albornoz were. This is most evident in works like Menocals and Lowneys, which, despite their substantial differences, play on a kind of nostalgia, constructing a past designed to be of some comfort when juxtaposed to a disturbing present. The most enduring (i.e., the least obviously culture bound) work being done on convivencia these days is not being done on the general subject of convivencia at all, but on one or more of its countless particular manifestations. The best of these studies combine a meticulous reconstruction of the historical context and the application of well-chosen social scientific models, in the interests of problematizing individual instances of convivencia. Short Biography Kenneth Baxter Wolf is the John Sutton Miner Professor of Medieval History at Pomona College in Claremont, California. His principle areas of research are Latin Christian interaction with Muslims, early medieval historiography, and Christian sanctity, especially as it relates to ideas about poverty. He is the author of Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain (Cambridge University Press, 1988), Making History: The Normans and their Historians in Eleventh-century Italy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), and The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis Reconsidered (Oxford University Press, 2003). He has also translated and edited four early medieval chronicles from Spain under the title Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain, (Liverpool University Press, 1990; Rev. ed., 1999). Most recently he translated the principal account of the Norman conquest of Sicily, which appeared under the title, The Deeds of Count Roger of Calabria and Sicily and of His Brother Duke Robert Guiscard (University of Michigan, 2005). He is currently finishing a translation of the canonization records of St. Elizabeth of Thringen. He is a past recipient of an NEH fellowship as well as a twoyear membership at the Institute for Advanced Studies. He holds a BA in Religious Studies and a PhD in History from Stanford University and has been a member of the History Department at Pomona his entire career. Notes
* Correspondence address: Kenneth Baxter Wolf, Department of History, Pomona College, 551 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711, USA. Email: kwolf@pomona.edu.
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Kenneth Baxter Wolf

Actually, it was Ramn Menndez Pidal (18691968) who coined the term, though for purely philological purposes. He used it to refer to the tendency for variants of the same word to coexist in peninsular Romance languages. Thomas Glick, Convivencia: An Introductory Note, in Mann et al., 1992, p. 1. See Castro, 1948, pp. 20814 for Castros earliest uses of the term convivencia. 2 Castro eschewed the term reconquista, which suggested to him an inappropriate sense of continuity between the Visigothic kingdom that ruled Spain before 711 and the various Christian entities that conquered portions of al-Anadalus over the course of the next eight centuries. He preferred to call it a long struggle between two uncertainties. Julio Rodrguez Purtolas, A Comprehensive View of Spanish History, in Amrico Castro and the Meaning of Spanish Civilization, ed. by Jos Rubia Barcia (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1976, p. 118). 3 La historia entre los siglos x y xv fue una contextura cristiano-islmico-juda (Castro, 1948, p. 471). 4 First propounded in his Espaa y el Islam, Revista de Occidente 24 (1929). It was Francisco J. Simonet (d. 1898) who first advanced a version of this general thesis. 5 Vicente Cantarinos Entre monjes y musulmanes: el conficto que fue Espaa (Madrid, 1978) is a good example, focusing on the rise of Christian militancy over the history of the reconquista and using it to explain Spains distinctive path towards modernity. For overviews of the CastroSnchez-Albornoz debate, see Martn 1967; Araya Goubet 1969, Gmez-Martnez 1975. 6 Castro taught at the University of Wisconsin (19371939), the University of Texas (1939 1940), and Princeton (19401953). His La Realidad histrica de Espaa (Mexico City, 1954) appeared in an English edition the very same year under the title The Structure of Spanish History (Princeton, 1954). 7 For a critique of the school of Spanish historiography epitomized by Snchez-Albornoz, see P. E. Russell 1959.

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, 1992, Convivencia: An Introductory Note, in VB Mann, TF Glick and JD Dodds (eds.), Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, pp. 19. George Braziller, New York, NY. Glick, T, & Pi-Sunyer, O, 1969, Acculturation as an Explanatory Concept in Spanish History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 11, pp. 13654. Gmez-Martnez, JL, 1975, Amrico Castro y el Origen De los Espaoles: Historia De una Polmica, Gredos, Madrid, Spain. Gonzlez-Lpez, E, 1976, The Myth of Saint James and its Functional Reality, in JR Barcia (ed.), Amrico Castro and the Meaning of Spanish Civilization, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Hames, HJ. ed., 2004, Muslims and Christians in and Around the Crown of Aragon: Essays in Honour of Professor Elena Lourie, Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands. Lpez-Lzaro, F, The Lachrymose and Celebratory Discourses of al-Andalus in European and Islamic Cultures, (Unpublished). Lowney, C, 2005, A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. MacKay, A, 1977, Spain in the Middle Ages: from Frontier to Empire, 10001500, St. Martins Press, New York, NY. Mann, V, Glick, T, & Dodds, J, (eds.), 1992, Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, George Braziller, New York. Martn, J-L, 1967, El occidente espaol en la alta edad media segn los trabajos de SnchezAlbornoz, Anuario de Estudios Medievales, vol. 4, pp. 599611. Menocal, MR, 1990, Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA. , 2002, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, Little, Brown, and Co., Boston, MA. Meyerson, M, 1991, The Muslims of Valencia in the Age of Fernando and Isabel: Between Coexistence and Crusade, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. , ed., 1999, Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Interaction and Cultural Change, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN. Monroe, JT., 1976, The Hispanic-Arabic World, in JR Barcia (ed.), Amrico Castro and the Meaning of Spanish Civilization, pp. 6987, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Nirenberg, D, 1996, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Ray, J, 2006, Beyond Tolerance and Persecution: Reassessing Our Approach to Medieval Convivencia, Jewish Social Studies, vol. 11, pp. 118. Russell, PE, 1959, The Nessus-Shirt of Spanish History, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 36, pp. 21925. Snchez-Albornoz, C, 1929, Espaa y el Islam, Revista de Occidente, vol. 24, pp. 130. , 1956, Espaa: Un Enigma Histrico, vol. 2. Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Wolf, K, 1988, Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

2008 The Author Religion Compass 3/1 (2009): 7285, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00119.x Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd