In Iberia and beyond: Hispanic Jews between Cultures

Abstract

In Iberia and Beyond: Hispanic Jews between Cultures. Bernard Dov Cooperman, ed. USA: Associated UP, 1998. x+390 pages. As Bernard Dov Cooperman explains in his Introduction, this collection of essays-the proceedings of a symposium held in 1991 at University of Maryland at College Park-endeavors to give reader a sense of breadth and scope of Spanish Jewish studies today, of range of scholarly disciplines used in field, and of new approaches and insights which characterize recent work in (2-3). In spite of fact that several years have elapsed since these papers were originally presented, topics they explore continue to be among most current in field of Sephardic studies. Dwayne E. Carpenter (The Portrayal of Jews in Learned's de Santa Maria [15-42]) examines in which Jews are protagonists (the corresponding illuminations for six of these are included), as well as those in which they are subjects of incidental references, and concludes that Alfonso does not go out of his way to malign Jews, especially in widely diffused stories involving Jews, but neither does he provide positive portrayals (24). Carpenter's study ends with a very useful enumerative appendix, References to Jews in Cantigas (31-34). Bernard Septimus (Hispano-Jewish Views of Christendom and Islam [43651) discusses reasons why Spanish Jews, unlike their European coreligionists, tended to prefer life under Christian rather than Islamic rule. In Economic Life of Jews of Murviedro in Fifteenth Century (67-95), Mark D. Meyerson illustrates that Jews to play significant roles in economy of Murviedro after a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms swept through Valencia in 1391. Moreover, while anti-Jewish sentiment was intensifying throughout Spain during fifteenth century, in Murviedro the variety of Jewish economic activity created a complex network of economic interdependence among Jews, Christians, and Muslims-a network characterized far more by cooperation and stability than by competitiveness and conflict (86). In a study which reaches a similar conclusion concerning Jews of northeastern Spain, Benjamin R. Gampel (Does Medieval Navarrese Jewry Salvage Our Notion of Convivencia [97-122]) re-evaluates concept of convivencia between Jews and Christians in socio-economic context of late fifteenth-century Navarre, a region in which Jews continued to have relationships with all religious and social classes within their society (117) until they were ordered, in 1498, to convert or face exile. Isaac Benabu (Poetry in Two Languages: The Kharja and Its Muwassah [12342]) focuses on Golden Age of Andalusian Hebrew poetry in his analysis of linguistic and thematic relationships between several of Yehuda ha-Levi's Hebrew muwassahs and their corresponding Hispano-- Romance kharjas. Eleazar Gutwirth (Widows, Artisans, and Issues of Life: Hispano-Jewish Bourgeois Ideology [143-73]) dispels myth that late-medieval Spanish Jews were mainly aristocrats by establishing that their financial, domestic, and literary activities more accurately depict existence of a Jewish bourgeois i. …