La Convivencia

La Convivencia ("The Coexistence") is an academic hypothesis regarding the period of Spanish history from the Muslim Umayyad conquest of Hispania in the early eighth century until the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. It claims that in the different Moorish Iberian kingdoms, the Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in relative peace. According to this interpretation of history, this period of religious diversity differs from later Spanish and Portuguese history when Catholicism became the sole religion in the Iberian Peninsula, as a result of expulsions and forced conversions.

However, the historicity of the above view of the supposed intercultural harmony has also been challenged as a "myth" and that it is too strongly dependent on unreliable documentation.

Cultural meaning

La Convivencia often refers to the interplay of cultural ideas between the three religious groups and ideas of religious tolerance. James Carroll invokes this concept and indicates that it played an important role in bringing the classics of Greek philosophy to Europe, with translations from Greek to Arabic to Hebrew and Latin.

End of the Convivencia

Main article: Expulsion of the Moriscos

Main article: Expulsion of the Jews from Spain

While the Reconquista was ongoing, Muslims and Jews who came under Christian control were allowed to practice their religion to some degree. This ended in the late 15th century with the fall of Granada in 1492. Even before this event, the Spanish Inquisition had been established in 1478. In 1492, with the Alhambra decree, those Jews who had not converted to Catholicism were expelled. Many Jews settled in Portugal, where they were expelled in 1497.

Similarly the Muslims of Iberia were forced to convert or face either death or expulsion. This happened even though the Granadan Muslims had been assured of religious freedom at the time of their surrender. Between 1500 and 1502 all remaining Muslims of Granada and Castile were converted. In 1525, Muslims in Aragon were similarly forced to convert. The Muslim communities who converted became known as Moriscos. Still they were suspected by the old Christians of being crypto-Muslims and so between 1609 and 1614 their entire population of 300,000 was forcibly expelled. All these expulsions and conversions resulted in Catholic Christianity becoming the sole sanctioned religion in the Iberian Peninsula.

Criticisms

David Nirenberg challenges the significance of the age of "convivencia", claiming that far from a "peaceful convivencia" his own work "demonstrates that violence was a central and systemic aspect of the coexistence of majority and minority in medieval Spain, and even suggests that coexistence was in part predicated on such violence".

Mark Cohen, professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, in his Under Crescent and Cross, calls the "idealized" interfaith utopia a "myth" that was first promulgated by Jewish historians such as Heinrich Graetz in the 19th century as a rebuke to Christian countries for their treatment of Jews. This myth was met with the "counter-myth" of the "neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history" by Bat Yeor and others, which also "cannot be maintained in the light of historical reality".

The Spanish mediaevalist Eduardo Manzano Moreno wrote that the concept of convivencia has no support in the historical record [“el concepto de convivencia no tiene ninguna apoyatura histórica“]. He further states that there is scarcely any information available on the Jewish and Christian communities during the Caliphate of Cordoba, and that this may come as a shock in view of the huge clout of the convivencia meme [“... quizá pueda resultar chocante teniendo en cuenta el enorme peso del tópico convivencial.”] Dr. Manzano attributes the genesis of the convivencia myth to the Spanish philologist Américo Castro (1885-1972). But Castro’s conception “… was never converted into a specific and well-documented treatment of el-Andalus, perhaps because Castro never succeeded in finding in the Arabist bibliography materials suitable for incorporation into his interpretation …”

During the Muslim rule of much of the Iberian Peninsula, Jews were living in an uneasy coexistence with Muslims and Catholics, and the relationship between these groups was, more often than not, marked by segregation and mutual hostility. In the 1066 Granada massacre of the entire Jewish population of the city, the Jewish death toll was higher than in the much publicized Christian pogromes in the Rhineland slightly later. The Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) was forced to flee from Al-Andalus to avoid conversion by the Almohads, which may have prompted his bitter statement that Islam had inflicted more pain on the Jewish people than any other 'nation'.

See also

• Al-Andalus (Moorish-governed Iberia)
• Moors (Muslims in Al-Andalus)
• Muladi (Christian converts to Islam)
• Mozarab (Christians in Al-Andalus)
• Mudéjar (Muslims in Christendom)
• Sephardim (Jews in Iberia)
• Morisco (Muslim converts to Catholism)
• Pablo Alvaro (a Jewish convert to Catholicism)
• Bishop Bodo (a Catholic convert to Judaism)
• Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain
• Timeline of the Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula
• Muslim conquests

Sources and further reading

• Catlos, Brian. The Victors and the Vanquished • Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon, 1050-1300, 2004. ISBN 0-521-82234-3.
• Esperanza Alfonso, Islamic culture through Jewish eyes : al-Andalus from the tenth to twelfth century ; 2007, ISBN 978-0-415-43732-5.
• Fernández-Morera, Darío : "The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise" ; in: the Intercollegiate Review, Fall 2006, pp. 23–31.
• O'Shea, Stephen. Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World. Walker & Company, 2006. ISBN 0-8027-1517-6.
• Pick, Lucy. Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain. Oxbow Books, 2004. ISBN 0-472-11387-9.
• Vivan Mann, et al., eds. Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain. George Braziller, 1992. ISBN 0-8076-1286-3.
• María Rosa Menocal, "Ornament of the World • How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain", 2003. ISBN 0-316-56688-8.

External links

• Sarah-Mae Thomas. The Convivencia in Islamic Spain July - August 2013
• Rageh Omaar An Islamic History of Europe. Video documentary of 90 minutes for BBC Four, 2005.
• Catherine Bott. Convivencia. Music CD of Spanish and Moorish songs from the period.
• Convivencia. International research project.