Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages Book

From the Islamic conquest of 711 until the capture of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, the Iberian Peninsula was home to three monotheistic faiths. Historiographically, this condition has been given a name: convivencia. Philologist and historian Amèrico Castro coined the term in 1948, using the word "co-existence" to introduce his theory on the origins of "Hispanidad" (Spanishness). The roots of Spanish culture, Castro claimed, lay in the centuries following 711; it was built from the shared cultural experiences of Muslims, Christians, and Jews who, despite their confessional antipathy, often lived side by side in the urban centers of Medieval Iberia. "La España fue única," he claimed, Spain was different, and convivencia was the reason why.

Since then, however, the notion of convivencia has been appropriated by the historians of Medieval Iberia as a de facto condition for evaluating the history of the peninsula. As historian Jonathan Ray once explained, the terms has become "the lens through which medieval Iberian civilization might be understood." If it is a lens, however, it is one which over the decades has become increasingly polarized as historians attempt to conflate the nature of convivencia with an argument for or against the existence of tolerance in Medieval Iberia. To further mix metaphors, convivencia is the yardstick of Spain's pre-modern history; an historian's assessment of his or her area of interest within the peninsula is held up against the standard of peaceful "coexistence," and it becomes our task to explain why at times inter-faith relations have flourished, or why at times they have broken down.
To cite one example, Thomas Glick and Oriol Pi-Sunyer, in an article entitled "Acculturation as an Explanatory Concept in Spanish History" attempted the schematize the history of Muslim-Christian relations on the peninsula according to periods of greater and lesser acculturation between Christians and Muslims. Muslim ascendency following the initial conquest set Christian/Gothic culture in opposition to the dominant Arabic/Islamic milieu. Similarly, the rise of Christian kingdoms to power following the "reconquest," was characterized by "extreme Christian rigidity and intolerance," culminating in the expulsions of 1492. According to Glick and Pi-Sunyer's analysis, "culture" was a primarily a function of power, and political and cultural hegemony were coterminous. Convivencia, for them, existed only in periods of political instability, wherein the "free passage of cultural influence in both directions and a general prevalence of tolerance… contrasted sharply with the rigid intolerance" of what came before and after.

Such schematization is alluring, because by assigning causation it renders comprehensible a history that was, from the outset, made messy and complicated by interwoven narratives of religion, warfare, alliance, and intermittent persecution. However experience tells us that reality resists such easy categorizations, why then, should we expect such an easy understanding of the past?

David Nirenberg, in contrast, gives us a glimpse of the complicated nature of interfaith relations in Medieval Spain. His book Communities of Violence analyses breakouts of inter-religious violence in the fourteenth century Crown of Aragon. In search of the meaning of these episodes of violence, Nirenberg combed through the archives of the Crown of Aragon in order to reconstruct the dynamics of interfaith coexistence. What he found were instances of ritualized, institutionalized violence that played a role in the functioning of Aragonese society even during the quieter periods between pogroms; as such episodes of extreme violence and religious unrest could not be disentangled from the more mundane history of day-to-day interactions and clashes that occurred between members of different religious groups living under the Crown.

What studies like Dr. Nirenberg's show us is that in order to counteract the wide-reaching stereotypes about religious life in the Middle Ages'the assumptions of blind fanaticism, the widely despised epithet "Dark Ages"'we must be willing to push our analysis of precisely those aspects of religious history that we would rather dismiss or avoid. Characterizing moments of conflict as manifestations of the intolerant or irrational absolves the historian from the search for any explanation, any further meaning. To analyze these phenomenon historically and critically we must therefore be wary of this proscriptive "spirit of irrationalism" (to borrow a turn of phrase from historian Richard Lim) "that is at once unhelpfully tautological and mystifying."