Learning in a Crusader City: Intellectual Activity and Intercultural Exchanges in Acre, 1191–1291 by Jonathan Rubin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Learning in a Crusader City: Intellectual Activity and Intercultural Exchanges in Acre, 1191–1291 by Jonathan Rubin George Summers Jonathan Rubin, Learning in a Crusader City: Intellectual Activity and Intercultural Exchanges in Acre, 1191–1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2018 x + 224 pp. In his classic essay on medieval scholastic culture, John Baldwin wrote, “Perhaps more than any other facet of civilized society, cultural achievement requires a modicum of political stability” (The Scholastic Culture of the Middle Ages, 1000–1300 (Heath: Lexington, MA 1971) 2). Stability was certainly a rare commodity in the bustling and fractious milieu of thirteenth-century Acre, and few scholars have approached the city as a center of learned culture. This book by Jonathan Rubin is an exception. Acknowledging the city’s cosmopolitan social context and focusing on its unique contributions to learning, Rubin establishes Crusader Acre as a vibrant space of intellectual acquisition and exchange. Although Acre differed from European intellectual centers in lacking both a university and durable systems of aristocratic patronage, Rubin argues that the city’s social context facilitated learned activity. Its Latin population, which included clergy, physicians, lawyers, scribes, and notaries, boasted a wide array of expertise. Dominican and Franciscan schools likely instructed students in theology and in the arts. Amongst Jews, meanwhile, the city assumed significance as a repository of obscure texts and a haven for expatriate scholars, and became an intellectual destination point to a greater degree than for the Christian world. Rubin’s broad definition of the word “intellectual” as applying to any activity relating to the production or dissemination of written knowledge allows him to explore the diverse assortment of scholarly endeavors—linguistic, legal, and theological—that arose from this religious and social context. Many such endeavors were distinctive. With reference to linguistic study, for instance, Rubin shows how Acre’s Dominican studium provided Arabic instruction to its students for preaching purposes, in one of the first instances of foreign language instruction in schools of this religious order. The city also saw the development of innovative approaches to vernacular French, which attained unusual status as a language of grammar and logic. Multiple Western legal traditions, both customary and academic, merged in the writings of the hitherto obscure jurist John of Ancona, who labored in the city during the middle of the [End Page 238] thirteenth century. Rubin emphasizes that Acre’s location on the cultural periphery of Europe encouraged such creative intellectual activities, while not inhibiting contact with mainstream European institutions of learning such as Paris and Oxford. Although Rubin argues for the existence of a “multilayered discourse” concerning Islam in the city, one that was marked both by polemic and by genuine curiosity, he has found no evidence that Muslims produced texts in Acre (137). Likewise, little evidence suggests that Acre’s Jewish communities engaged in intellectual conversation with Latins. On the other hand, Acre did serve as a context for the growth of Western knowledge of Eastern Christianity, particularly in the writings of Jacques de Vitry, bishop of Acre from 1216–1228; later in the thirteenth century, Rubin suggests, relations between Eastern and Western Christians in Acre came to be characterized by formal theological discussion and debate. Western knowledge of Arabic, if not ultimately utilized as a tool for preaching to Muslims, did facilitate inter-Christian communication. It also served indirectly as a medium of exchange for secular forms of knowledge, for instance in a French-Arabic medical glossary possibly produced in the city. If one extends the meaning of intercultural exchange beyond the boundaries of Christian-Muslim relations or East-West knowledge transfer, Rubin argues, Acre’s status as a zone of ecumenical interaction, as a meeting place of diverse Frankish legal traditions, and as a space of conversation between eastern and western Jewish scholars becomes more evident. Scholars of Acre face a significant challenge in that many sources relevant to the city were destroyed during the Mamluk conquest of the city in 1291. They will, therefore, be grateful to Rubin for assembling as an appendix a catalog of forty-four texts believed to have been produced in Crusader Acre. These are mostly from manuscript books, which tend to receive more emphasis...