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Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims in Medieval Spain: Cooperation and Conflict. By NORMAN ROTH. Medieval Iberian Peninsula, Texts and Studies, vol. 10. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1994. Pp. 367. HFI 115, $65.75.
Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. By NORMAN ROTH. Madison: UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS, 1995. Pp. xvi + 429. $50.
Two extremes attract those who write about minorities, and particularly about Jews, in any of the reigns which now constitute Spain. On the one hand there is the lachrymose view, first voiced in the historical writings of refugees from the expulsion of 1492, that life in Sefarad, as elsewhere in the Diaspora, was, for all intents and purposes, a relentless series of persecutions. Yitzhak Baer and some of his followers in the so-called Jerusalem school can be thought of as modern exponents of this view. Baer, writing in the decades surrounding the Holocaust, treated the history of the Jews in Spain as an allegory for what he took to be the predestined tragic failure of all Jewish attempts at integration. At the other extreme are the proponents of convivencia, "living together." There is no reason why the term, coined to describe the coexistence of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Iberian Peninsula, should designate only harmonious coexistence, but it has in fact acquired this meaning among certain scholars. These scholars present the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula as uniquely tolerant of religious minorities, until the expulsion of 1492. They minimize periods of violence and persecution, stress cultural cooperation, and talk frequently of a "golden age" of Jewish culture.
Norman Roth, the author of the two books under review, is the most optimistic adherent of this latter school. Elsewhere he has written that he does "not like to talk about a particular `golden age' of Jewish culture in medieval Spain, for the whole history of that civilization was a golden age for the Jews.'' In the introduction to the first of these books (henceforth JVM) he adopts a more tabloid style: "In truth, the real extent of convivencia in medieval Christian Spain has not yet been fully revealed. The true story is nothing short of amazing" (p. 2). Because R. has dedicated his career to piecing together that story, the...