The Sephardic Frontier

The "Reconquista" and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia

Jonathan Ray

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780801444012
• eBook ISBN: 9780801468261
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconquista, the rapid expansion of the power of the Christian kingdoms into the Muslim-populated lands of southern Iberia, which created a broad frontier zone that for two centuries remained a region of warfare and peril. Drawing on a large fund of unpublished material in royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal archives as well as rabbinic literature, Jonathan Ray reveals a fluid, often volatile society that transcended religious boundaries and attracted Jewish colonists from throughout the peninsula and beyond.

The result was a wave of Jewish settlements marked by a high degree of openness, mobility, and interaction with both Christians and Muslims. Ray's view challenges the traditional historiography, which holds that Sephardic communities, already fully developed, were simply reestablished on the frontier. In the early years of settlement, Iberia's crusader kings actively supported Jewish economic and political activity, and Jewish interaction with their Christian neighbors was extensive.

Only as the frontier was firmly incorporated into the political life of the peninsular states did these frontier Sephardic populations begin to forge the communal structures that resembled the older Jewish communities of the North and the interior. By the end of the thirteenth century, royal intervention had begun to restrict the amount of contact between Jewish and Christian communities, signaling the end of the open society that had marked the frontier for most of the century.

PART I

THE JEWISH SETTLER AND THE FRONTIER

The transition of Jewish society from Muslim to Christian Iberia was already well underway by the thirteenth century. The great Jewish centers of al-Andalus that had survived the long political and cultural decline of Muslim rule were unable to endure the vicissitudes of the eleventh and twelth centuries. During this period, a series of Berber rulers from North Africa set out to restore Islamic dominance in the peninsula, and abruptly ended the long-standing tradition of tolerant policies toward the region’s dhimmi (Jewish and Christian) populations. Beginning in the late eleventh century, the Almoravids and their successors, the Almohad dynasty, instituted a program of extortion and religious persecution of Andalusi Jews and Christians that drove waves of refugees across the northern borders into the lands of Castile, Aragon, and southern France. At the same time, the Christian kingdoms of northern Iberia were undergoing an unprecedented period of territorial expansion and institutional development. By 1228, the Christian armies had defeated the Almohad rulers and driven them from the peninsula. Thus, within a century of their mass departure from al-Andalus, the descendants of these Jewish exiles were able to follow the tide of Christian victory back to the cities of southern Iberia.

The dual phenomena of reconquistay repoblación, of conquest and resettlement of Muslim territory, had been a primary feature of Iberian society since the ninth century. However, it was the permanence and, more importantly, the size of the territories taken by the Christians in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries that set them apart from lands taken in early campaigns. Between their combined victory at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 and the fall of Seville in 1248, the crowns of Aragon and Castile reclaimed nearly half of the peninsula, including the regions of Andalusia, Murcia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands, and established a boundary between Christian and Muslim Iberia that would stand for two and a half centuries.

While historians have long since noted the prominent role that Jews played in the administration of these newly conquered territories, little attention has been given to the impact that Christian expansion had on the Jews themselves. In his twelfth-century chronicle, Sefer ha-Qabbalah, Abraham ibn Daud describes the dire situation of the Jews in Muslim Iberia on the eve of the Christian conquest.

The rebels against the Berber kingdom had crossed the sea to Spain after having wiped out every remnant of Jews from Tangiers to al-Mahdiya. “Turn again thy hand as a grape-gatherer upon the roots.” They tried to do the same thing in all of the cities of the Ishmaelite kingdom in Spain, “if it had not been the Lord who was for us,” let Israel now say.

The chronicle goes on to depict the arduous journey of the escaping refugees and the suffering of those who were unable to flee. Those who fled northward into Christian Castile were welcomed at the frontier castle of Calatrava by Alfonso VII through the person of his Jewish agent, Judah the Nasi.

Now when this great Nasi, R. Judah, was appointed over Calatrava, 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…. When all the nation had finished passing over [the border] by means of his help, the King sent him and appointed him lord of all his household and ruler over all his possessions.1

The successes of the renewed Christian reconquista were swift and vast, and a half-century after the exodus described by ibn Daud, the Jews stood poised to return to the lands of the south. In the second half of the thirteenth century, the chaos and instability caused by war and the mass-migrations of whole populations gave way to a colonized frontier that was steadily incorporated into the political, cultural, and socioeconomic life of the various peninsular states. As the defeated Muslims fled the farms and cities of southern Iberia, a succession of Christian kings granted lands, tax exemptions and other privileges in order to attract new settlers, Jews as well as Christians. These incentives attracted Jewish settlers from every corner of the peninsula and abroad to help populate and develop the new cities of the frontier. For the Jews of these territories, the success of the thirteenth-century conquests led to the proliferation of new Jewish settlements, and signaled the return to prominence of former Jewish centers such as Córdoba, Seville, and Valencia, which had been decimated by the Almohad persecutions.2 If the Jews, as a group, did not play a major role in the reconquista and repoblación of the newly Christianized territories of southern Iberia in the thirteenth century, individual Jews did take advantage of the social and economic opportunities created by Christian expansion.

In the first half of this book I will endeavor to reconstruct the early stages of Jewish settlement in the newly Christianized territories of southern Iberia. In addition to a scarcity of sources, the effort to trace the development of Jewish communities from the ground up has been further frustrated by the long-standing historiographic tradition of viewing medieval Jewries in communal terms. The reasons behind this tendency are indeed many and complex, ranging from the impact of Christian and Jewish legislative sources and tax records that address Jews corporately, to the religious and philosophical agendas of historians who imagine Jews as a people. The centrality of the communal paradigm to the perception of Hispano-Jewish history is particularly striking. In contrast to northern Europe, Iberian Jewry boasted a seemingly unbroken presence in the peninsula since Roman times, a fact that has fostered the assumption of an eternal and inevitable Jewish community.3 The establishment of Jewish settlements in Christian Iberia during the high Middle Ages has thus been understood less in terms institutional development than in terms of changing cultural context and political jurisdiction. The Jews are seen as already living in organized communal entities, merely exchanging one overlord for another.

This model of Jewish settlement is illustrated by the charters granted to the Jews of Tudela (c. 1115 and 1170) and Tortosa (c. 1145), which have come to be viewed as emblematic of the transition of Jewish society from Muslim to Christian rule over the course of the reconquista. The former were granted to a pre-existing Jewish community that had fled the city during its siege and was now being asked to return. At Tortosa, the charter given by Ramón Berenguer IV more closely equated settlement with community, stating that:

In that quarter you shall remain and live securely and peacefully with all your goods for all times. If more Jews come to settle, I shall give them homes to occupy and settle. […] I grant you those good laws and all customs and usages which the Jews of Barcelona enjoy, as relates to sureties and arbitration and judgments and testimonies and all good customs which the Jews of Barcelona enjoy.4

Our first encounter with these Jews is thus as members of established communities. In contrast to this paradigm of Jewish transition during the reconquista, the creation of Jewish settlements in southern Iberia affords us the opportunity to chronicle the evolution of a Hispano-Jewish community as it takes form. Rather than begin with Jews already living in fully functioning corporate entities, this study takes as its point of departure the individual settlers from which these communities were formed. Moreover, by locating the process of Jewish settlement and economic development within the framework of Christian conquest and colonization we obtain a much stronger basis for understanding the nature of Jewish communal organization and the Jews’ social and political relationships with Gentile society.

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1 A Critical Edition and Translation of the Book of Tradition (Sefer ha-Qabbalah) by Abraham Ibn Daud, ed. Gerson Cohen (Philadelphia, 1967), 96–99, English section.

2 For the effects of the persecutions and forced conversions on Andalusi Jewry, see Abraham Halkin, “History of the Forced Conversion under the Alhmohads,” in The Joshua Starr Memorial Volume (New York, 1953), 101–110 [Hebrew]. On the religious fundamentalism of the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties, see Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (New York, 1992), 105–130.

3 The “communal approach” to medieval Jewish history is so prevalent that it is almost impossible to single out influential works. However, see Salo Baron, The Jewish Community, Its History and Its Structure to the American devolution (Philadelphia, 1942); Yitzhak Baer, “The Foundations and Beginnings of the Jewish Community Structure in the Middle Ages,” Zion 15 (1950) [Hebrew], 1–41; and Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (New York, 1961).

4 The charters have achieved a relatively high level of circulation and influence in Jewish Studies through their translation and publication in Robert Chazan’s sourcebook Church, State, and Jew (West Orange, N.J., 1980), 69–73. For Tortosa, see also Yizhak (Fritz) Baer, Die Juden im christlichen Spanien (Berlin, 1936), vol. i, no. 28, pp. 16–17.

CHAPTER ONE

THE MIGRATION OF JEWISH SETTLERS TO THE FRONTIER

I weep like an ostrich for Lucena.

Her remnant dwelt innocent and secure,

Unchanged for a thousand years;

Then came her day and her people were exiled and she a widow…

I will shave my head and cry bitterly over the exiles from Seville,

Over her noble men that were slain and their sons enslaved,

Over refined daughters converted to the foreign faith.

Alas, the city of órdoba is forsaken, her ruin as vast as the sea!

Her sages and learned men perished from hunger and thirst.

Not a single Jew was left in Jaèn or Almeria;

Mallorca and Malaga struggle to survive.

The Jews who remain are a beaten and bleeding wound.

For this I mourn and learn a dirge and wail with bitter lamentation;

I shout in my distress: They have vanished like water.

—Abraham Ibn Ezra

The Berber invasions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries brought to a tragic halt one of the longest and most glorious chapters in Jewish history. The Jews of Muslim Spain had been the successors to the great rabbinic centers of Baghdad and Jerusalem, and their diverse cultural achievements and general prosperity were unrivaled by any contemporary Jewish center. Moses ibn Ezra, an older relative of the poet cited above, summed up the attitude of superiority that Andalusi Jews possessed with regard to their intellectual tradition:

There is no doubt at all that the inhabitants of Jerusalem from whom we, members of the Spanish exile, are descended, were more knowledgeable in rhetorical eloquence and in rabbinic tradition than the residents of other cities and towns.1

For such aesthetes as the Ibn Ezras, the delicate flower of Andalusi Jewish culture could not easily be transplanted in the soil of Christian Spain. In contrast to the cosmopolitan cities and glittering courts of the Andalusi princes, the Christian castles of the north seemed crude and uninviting, and provided little to assuage the Jews’ bitterness over the fall of their illustrious communities. Such poignant lamentations over the ruin of Andalusi Jewry and the subsequent removal of its surviving members to Christian lands are, to this day, a powerful image of the precarious nature of medieval Jewish life. Yet the despair echoed by these poets represent but one aspect of the transfer of Jewish society from Muslim to Christian Spain.2

By the eleventh century, Jewish communities had already become well established in the burgeoning Christian towns of northern Iberia, and Jewish advisors, physicians, and civil servants had become fixtures at royal and baronial courts across the penins...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I. The Jewish Settler and the Frontier
• Part II. The Jewish Community and the Frontier
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography