Tag: modern and medieval

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The Star of David (and the Church and the Caliph and Chicago Feminsits)

The first time I traveled with students to Spain, one in my group was a talkative sophomore in the NYU honors program with a name straight out of the Hebrew Bible. He was great at keeping any discussion going — I suspect that he liked the attention that talking brought him, but he was also genuinely interested and had questions at every turn. In the Prado Museum he saw six-pointed stars surrounding a late fourteenth-century church altarpiece and asked our tour guide — an older Spanish art historian of a conservative school of thought — why there were Jewish stars in Christian art.  The guide looked puzzled and I asked him to hold off and ask me later. I knew she wouldn’t understand his question, because those six-pointed stars were not Jewish stars. He repeated his question when he saw the same geometric design in the modern plaza below the tenth-century walls of the Arab settlement at Majeriṭ, which would come later to be known as Madrid.

“It reflects geometric designs found in Islamic contexts from the period when this wall was built,” I explained. He argued for its inherent Jewishness.

“In the tenth century,” I answered him, “and all the way up to the fourteenth, the six-pointed star wasn’t a Jewish symbol; it was just a geometric design.”

He was incredulous, reluctant to accept that a shape with such deep symbolism could have been chosen, as he put it, “just at random.” His final argument was: “But it’s on the flag of Israel!”

“Which,” I reminded him, “was founded well after the fourteenth century.”

This is a very typical and important kind of conversation. Students who were brought up in any one of the Abrahamic religious traditions that my research and teaching touch upon often find their personal beliefs and the tenets they learned in their families or their synagogues, churches, or mosques, challenged by the historical development of their religions and the ways in which medieval people practiced those religions that look very different from the ways in which they are practiced today. I tell every class of students at the beginning of every semester — and I firmly believe — that my role as a teacher isn’t to change or challenge their religious beliefs or their place in their own communities; rather, my role is to show them where scholarship has gotten us. And every semester I have students express shock — sometimes loudly, but always, in my experience, without malice and in a way that can start defensive but usually leads to very genuine inquiry — as they learn the history of their communities and learn the ways in which religious history has been interpreted throughout time.

A different set of questions about the symbolism of the Jewish star, and with a very different tenor, have been raised by various LGBTQ and feminist groups demonstrating this summer: The Dyke March in Chicago ejected marchers who were carrying the gay-pride flag modified with a white Jewish star; the feminist Slut Walk in the same city has indicated that it will adopt a policy of ejecting anyone wearing Jewish symbols and has begun to use the anti-semitic slur “zio” in some of its publicity materials. Slut Walk protests in some other cities are following suit, while others are openly welcoming Jewish feminist marchers.

Perhaps most striking in the aftermath of the Dyke March was some of the organizers claiming that they were justified because “different symbols mean different things to different people.” That is, of course, what makes literature work. When the principle stops working, though, is when a reader of the symbol decides that it can only work one way; it turns the interpretation of literature into a treasure-hunt for symbols and a cryptogram to be solved, nothing more. And in day-to-day life, it tends to stop working when an outside what the one operative meaning of a symbol they have chosen for themselves works.

The history of the six-pointed star as a Jewish symbol doesn’t run along a straight line. There are two ideas about the origin of the symbol that are common in many Jewish communities: First, that it is a messianic symbol that dates back to an early Jewish revolt against the Romans in the 2nd century of the Common Era; and second, that it acquires a mystical meaning somewhere in between the 13th century, when the kabbalistic work The Zohar was composed and the 16th, with the composition of Isaac Luria’s The Book of the Lion. Both of these ideas are parts of the stories that communities tell about the evolution of their own symbols and rituals. The reality is much more complicated and interesting.

The scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem traced a different development of the symbol: It occurs occasionally in very limited Jewish contexts in the early centuries of the Common Era; it appeared as a part of underground Jewish magical practices beginning in the thirteenth century, came above ground in the fourteenth, and didn’t come to be known as the “Shield of David” and be a symbol of the Jewish people, and recognized as such by both Jews and Christians until as late as the seventeenth century in central Europe. It does not start being used on Jewish tombstones until that point, and does not spread to the rest of Europe and the world until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth. It was adopted by the Zionist congress in 1897, but also remained a Jewish symbol, apart from nationalism.

The stories about the role of the Jewish star in the Bar Kochba rebellion and as a part of Lurianic kabbalah are stories that communities tell about the origin of a symbol that has come to have meaning. In large measure, the Star of David is one that has come to be meaningful through a process of reclamation by different Jewish communities: It was imposed by Christian nobility in 17th-century Prague and Jews there came to claim it as their own; and, as Scholem himself wrote: “But even Zionism did not do so much to confer the sacredness of a true symbol on the Shield of David as did that mad dictator who made of it a badge of shame for millions of our people, who compelled them to wear it publicly on their clothing as the badge of exclusion and of eventual extermination. Under this sign they moved along the road of horror and degradation, struggle and heroism. If there be such a thing as a soil that grows meaning for symbols, this is it.” For the sake of this argument I will concede the separation of Zionism and Judaism (although I don’t think that such a point can really be conceded so freely without further discussion, nor do I think that it is non-Jewish liberals who should be allowed to define these terms, either) and say that while it is a Zionist symbol, it is also a wholly separate Jewish symbol with its own range of meanings and long, winding history.

(Just as an aside: I also hesitate to draw in Scholem’s point about the Holocaust being what effectively sanctified the symbol in the 20th century because of the way it has become a political football in precisely this kind of discussion: I can think of half a dozen examples since the November election when non-Jewish liberals have, on one hand, used the Holocaust to make a political point about discrimination and genocide . This political rhetoric, which grows up alongside protest movements such as the ones under discussion here, appropriates the tragedy but then also dictates what is the appropriate response of victims. I know that those are not the values and the actions of liberal groups and activists that value cultural authenticity and the self-determination of minority groups. I don’t know how to reconcile the contradiction.)

On the face of it, I’ve made two different points through the anecdotes in this blog post: On the one hand, I wanted to challenge my student to think about the six-pointed star in artistic contexts outside of Judaism and earlier than its usage as a Jewish symbol. On the other hand, I hate to see non-Jewish activists dictate how their Jewish counterparts use a symbol that is of history community value to them. Maybe I’m just a contrarian pain in the arse who likes challenging people’s assumptions. But maybe the points aren’t so far apart from each other after all: in each case, I would ask people to think about a geometric shape and its life in the world as it is, not as they would like it to be. I asked my student to think about the use of the six-pointed star outside of Jewish contexts, and I’d ask the organizers of the Slut Walk to think about it as one that has its own history and mythology in an American Jewish community that has been and is increasingly living under threats of religious persecution.  As liberals, we have accepted as a first principle that the way in which a community, particularly a community at a structural disadvantage, defines itself merits respect. (And for the academics in the bunch, we’re past the linguistic turn and know that accounts of history are representations of their author rather than a recoverable accounting of What Actually Happened Then.) And so narrative — and in this case the stories that Jews, and even politically liberal Jews tell ourselves about the history of our symbol — is a reality worthy of respect. In my role as a teacher, I want my students to see a world that does not have them at the center. In my role as a Jewish feminist, I want my community to be able to define itself and to be heard.

*None of the photos in this post are my own.

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Onomastics and Minimum Standards

“If my students come away from my class and four years later remember nothing about the Middle Ages but only remember when they pick up a newspaper that not everyone with an Arabic name is Muslim, then that’s enough.”

I’ve said it often enough to colleagues, thought I’d never say it directly to students because I wouldn’t want them to know what my absolute bare minimum standard is — I always want them to exceed it rather than shoot straight for it. It’s a topic that most often comes up in the course of discussing which way we err when we simplify the complex narrative of Andalusi cultural history for introductory-level undergraduates: for the sake of the narrative do we make it seem rosier than the historical reality or more conflictive than it? In an ideal world we would do neither but even a simplified narrative is, realistically, confusing for students who are not yet primed for historical complexity and a narrative helps. I defend my kind of simplification with the logic of what I want students to walk away with. At the end of the day, if they remember only one thing from my class, what should that be? I tend to simplify in the rosy direction because I want my students to remember the cross-cultural pollination that proximity yields; and it is is easier for them to understand that in those rosy terms even if it is equally close conflict that brings about cultural flourishing.

A gruesome tragedy is playing itself out in the local — and even international — headlines: a judge, the first African-American woman to serve on the New York State  Court of Appeals appears to have committed suicide by walking into the Hudson River and letting go. It is by all accounts a tragedy; those who knew her say she was a compassionate person and a sharp legal mind. But an error crept into the first versions of the news reports and has since been replicated worldwide, even though it has been corrected at its source: the judge, whose surname was Abdu-Salam, was initially described as Muslim even though she was not.

https://twitter.com/el_pais/status/852948341491191812

A correction explains the source of the error:

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Her name.

With very rare exceptions, my students are not going to go on to become medievalists. Some of them take my class because they have a genuine, if lay, interest in the subject, some for reasons of heritage, some because they’ve been to Spain and have seen the Alhambra and don’t quite realize how complex and difficult the class is that they’re about to take, some because they did well in AP European History and don’t know how different my narrative and my methodologies will be; but by far and away, the most common reason I hear from students for taking my class (especially the very introductory, freshman-level lecture class) is: “It fit my schedule.” I have some students who are there because they care about the material, but a much larger percentage who are there to fulfill a requirement. I know that the smaller group will understand the complexities, ask great questions, and retain a lot of the details; but again, trying to be realistic, after the final exam most of them will remember only one big takeaway from my class, and that’s it. (Do I wish it were different? Sure. Just about every day. But you work with what you’ve got.) For those students, as heretical as it may be for me to say so, I’m not sure that the takeaway should be strictly medieval.

And so for me, that takeaway is this: language, art, and literature have no confession. That’s all.

If my students can come away from my class knowing that Christians and Jews can also have abds and ibns and als in their names, that’s enough. It’s enough so that when they are the obituary-writers and the investigative reporters who are shaping public perception and defining the news that is fit to print (nevermind when they are the ones setting immigration policy or dropping bombs), they won’t make silly mistakes based on unfounded biases about what kinds of languages and what kinds of names belong to what kinds of religions.

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Nerdy Knitting

I ran out of yarn while at the 4th Annual St. Louis Medieval and Renaissance Symposium Mini-Conference on the Cultures of the Translation in the Medieval Mediterranean. On the plus side, this means I finished a scarf* (based on a historical pattern) that has completely unnecessarily taken over three years to finish; on the down side it means I needed to stop and pick up some new yarn for the flight home. (Most of the time when a knitter tells you that he or she needs yarn, question the definition of the term need; in this case, it was really a question of having something to do on the flight home that would distract me from how much I hate flying. This is about as close to a legitimate, dictionary-standard definition of need as it gets with yarn.)

This will actually become as much a medieval poetry post as a knitting one momentarily. Really.

Continue reading “Nerdy Knitting”

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Generic Enemies

There is a 2007 edition of the ethical will of Judah ibn Tibbon that was made within more of a religious publishing framework than an academic one. It’s useful because it has the poetry fully vocalized, but it makes its point of view clear at the expense of scholarship in certain places. (For example, it changes a reference to Samuel’s study in the secular subjects to set him to studying religious law; although the manuscript is clear, the change can be made with one single letter in the Hebrew.)

I discovered today that there is a second edition of this redaction of the text that was produced in Monsey, reprinting the Hebrew edition and adding an English introduction and a translation of parts of the text.

Judah took himself into exile circa 1148 following the rise of the unfairly-maligned Almohad dynasty in Spain. The Hebrew introduction to the volume explains his flight as his reaction to “pressure from Muslim zealots in Spain.”

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Yet somehow, by the time we get to the English introduction, Judah has been driven out of twelfth-century Granada by a recent invasion of Visigoths.

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There is literary precedent in the Middle Ages for the conflation of national enemies and their incarnation in a single form or group or race or tribe, as when Samuel ibn Naghrila uses the names of biblical tribes to refer to the enemies of Zirid Granada, thereby making the political enemies of the state the religious enemies of its Jewish citizens and residents. There are also texts that have a tendency to run to litanies of national enemies with the ultimate outcome being Jewish victory, as well as the literary-religious trope of the Amalekites standing in as any all-purpose enemy.

So the idea of conflating Visigoths with Almohads just to signal both as enemies of Jews certainly comes from somewhere, but there is something very jarring about it all the same.

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A Colophon for Every Occasion

I submitted my book manuscript to the press this morning. One of the things that still strikes me about reading medieval texts is the extent to which medieval readers were so similar in some of their attitudes to us as modern readers. In this case, I came across the work of a scribe who felt similarly about finishing his work as I do about mine:

TAM AL KITAB

Cambridge University Library, T-S 10 G 5

تم الكتاب والحمد لله

תם אלכתאב ואלחמד ללה

Book’s done. Thank God!

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As a Medievalist I Can’t Help You. Maybe Nobody Can. (Or, what I’m not going to tell my students after Paris)

[[[I wrote this all out as I was thinking about what I would say this evening to the students in my honors seminar. They’re a group of forty students whom I see once every other week for an hour to guide them in research fundamentals, loosely structured around the theme of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Spain then and now. Because of the theme of the course and because we will be traveling as a group to Europe next month, I thought I had to say something to them about Paris; but the group was too large and too unfamiliar just for an informal debrief-chat. So I had to put some though into what I was going to say to them rather than how I might guide a conversation.]]]

I want to start out by talking about gargoyles. Gargoyles are one of the most iconic kinds of medieval art, but most of the ones that are still on buildings today are from the nineteenth century; they’re replicas and new inventions from a period when there was a renewed interest in the Middle Ages in Europe, and they became a way for people to articulate their own concerns and ideas without really claiming them. They couched their deepest, darkest secrets in neo-medieval art. But make no mistake about it; these are the monsters of modernity.

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Amongst the gargoyles of Notre Dame are very few human figures, and the ones that are there represent the racialist theories of the nineteenth century. One of the few medieval scenes that remains includes a group of people rising from the dead at the Apocalypse, and one of those is a representation of a black man; it is one of the earliest representations that we have of a black person in European art. It is sympathetic and unremarkable: a black person amongst the dead that shall be raised.

By contrast, the single human form on façade of Notre Dame as it was restored in the nineteenth century is known as the wandering Jew. There is nothing monstrous about this representation, but it is telling that the only human amongst all the monsters is a member of a religious minority, racialized into monstrosity in the nineteenth century. This gargoyle is telling the story not of medieval Jews but of modern race theory.

An apochryphal legend is that the wandering Jew chimera bears the likeness of an especially hated foreman on the restoration project. It’s not true, but the tale foreshadows a complete reversal in the modern period.

Gargoyles require periodic restoration, and just as was done for Notre Dame 150 years ago, the façade of the cathedral in Lyon was more recently restored. Rather than being hated, the stonemason’s foreman at the building site was respected by all of the craftsmen for his reasonable expectations and his fairness. And so one of the stone masons decided to honor him by carving a gargoyle in his likeness and giving it his name, Ahmed, and his piety as a Muslim by carving the phrase “Allahu akbar,” God is great, into the base of the figure.

TO GO WITH FRENCH PAPER : "LYON: LA GARG

Perhaps predictably, local religious conservatives kicked up a storm, complaining about the Islamization of their cathedral. To its eternal credit, the local church administration spoke out in favor of Ahmed the Gargoyle, pointing out that like Muslims, Catholics also believe that God is great and are willing to attest to that in any language. Gargoyles and chimeras just are a neo-medieval form for people to express their opinions, good and bad, about the modern world.

https://twitter.com/Ayisha_Malik/status/665329076127850497

God is great is what the attackers shouted out in Paris this weekend as they gunned down people in the dozens. But it is also what French Muslims called out when they prayed that night for their country. And it is the sentiment, inscribed in Arabic at the base of the Lyonnais gargoyle. If gargoyles are expressions of modernity, Ahmed more than most hearkens back to the Middle Ages, when educated, literate people knew that they could read in many language, accept many truths, and hold many contradicting ideas — sic et non — with no problem. Arabic was no contradiction to Europe, and the greatness of one unitary God was mutually acceptable.

Obviously I am starting out today talking about Jewish and Muslim gargoyles in France because in a seminar on Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the country just next door, I didn’t think I could leave this weekend’s events unremarked.

Spain’s Islamic history is different than France’s. And in part because of that difference, I can assure you that our trip will be okay. Besides that, universities are risk-averse; NYU would not send us if there were any hint of danger. Our activities are being planned by people who live and work in Madrid and know lay of the city and its rhythms and are arranging everything with a safety-first attitude.

[[[That last bit is a lie. I reasonably suspect it will be fine but I am terrified all the same. I will tell them this lie over, and over, and over again until they believe it and I do. The flowers and the candles will protect us and we will not be cowed by men with guns. Trust me. I am the one with the advanced degree and the authority. Trust me; this lie must be true.]]

But just like the gargoyles of an imagined medieval France, a lot of observers take medieval Spain as a vessel through which to express their modern ideas, monstrous or marvelous. They see it as a place where Jews, Christians, and Muslims created a productive, coherent artistic and literary culture together and ask why it cannot be so today; or they see a place in which law and politics vacillated between protective and repressive and deadly and remark that given our joint historical past, today could be no other way.

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[[[This is the part that I’m not going to tell them:]]]

There’s a sense that the Middle Ages, and the Spanish Middle Ages in particular, ought to have something to say to us at moments like this.

As a medievalist I can’t help you; and in darker moments I think that maybe nobody can. I can give you a framework in which you can hang your own ideas and aspirations and vision of the world. Sometimes it’s valuable to be able to talk about modern issues from behind the safety of a medieval guise. But conversely, maybe it’s not any better to imagine a medieval world in which coexistence figured differently than it is to imagine a superhero multiverse in which a man of steel will catch you when you fall and vanquish the bad guys who pushed you into the chasm.

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I don’t have answers anymore; maybe I never did. A few months ago, in one of the Republican presidential candidate debates, Carly Fiorina said she was prepared to tackle the ISIS problem because her bachelor’s degree is in medieval history and philosophy. Everyone in my line of work laughed because the Middle Ages cannot fix a world irredeemably changed by the Enlightenment and the rise of the nation-state and the fraternal-twin ideologies of imperialism and colonialism. But it gives us something to do as the world crumbles around us and, more importantly, a way to do it.

[[[I will pick up again here.]]]

Most of you are not going to write your senior honors theses on a medieval topic; a lot of you are not going to write in a humanities discipline at all; but you are all heirs to the Middle Ages by virtue of being here in a university. The idea of gathering together to pursue higher education, to ask great questions, and to hold many contradictory ideas all at once and have that be okay is an invention of thirteenth-century Paris.

So let’s get on with going all medieval on your book review assignment, asking good questions and holding two contradictory opinions — sic et non — at the same time without exploding into a fit of modern clarity.

[[[In the end, I skipped the gargoyles and told them only the part that I thought I would not; that was the heart of the matter.]]]

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Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!: Ben[insert noun here] Netanyahu and European History

Caveat lector: This is not an academic article on the historiography of the Spanish Inquisition or of the implications of Benzion Netanyahu’s historical thinking, although I am certain that such an article could be written. Nor is it even a “long-read” or a well-documented, meticulously argued think piece for an interested lay audience; although my ultimate goal is to use this space to do that kind of better-developed essayistic writing, I will not realistically have the time or the intellectual energy to do so until early next calendar year when my book manuscript will be done and out of my hands. And yet, in my capacity as a medievalist in this modern world, I think I have something original and perhaps of some value to say about an issue that arose this week; and so I am writing about it rather than waiting too long for a proper, full-length, exquisitely footnoted essay to be relevant or of interest. This, then? This is still just a blog post. It is the beginning of the articulation of a thought. It is a mere observation. If you are a reader who needs to consider every bit of another academic’s output in the terms of the academy, then perhaps think of it as an abstract.

Wa-amma ba’d: Several years ago I was teaching a seminar centered around the four seminal events in Spain of the year 1492: The fall of Nasrid rule in Granada, the expulsion of the Jews, Christopher Columbus’ first voyage, and the publication of the first grammar of Spanish with its provocation to empire through language. When the students turned in the annotated bibliographies for their research papers, I noticed that one student had written something to the effect that it made sense that one of her sources, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain, took such a defensive line about anti-Semitism because it obviously fell within the author’s political goals as prime minister of Israel. I explained to her in my written comments that the “B. Netanyahu” whose name was on the cover was not the prime minister of Israel, but rather his father; I explained how she could use WorldCat or the Library of Congress web site to look up the full name of an author and discover that this weighty volume was written by Benzion and not Benyamin. Privately I shook my head in disbelief that it wouldn’t have occurred to her to question whether it was plausible that the prime minister of Israel might or might not have written such a book. The next time this question arises — and I can say with greater certainty now that it will — I will have no plausible reason to be surprised.

netanyahuFar be it from me to propose a psychoanalytic reading of text, but the prime minister of Israel appears to be moonlighting in his father’s footsteps as a revisionist historian, claiming that Hitler had planned an expulsion of Jews from Germany in the 1930s, and that it was the grand mufti of Jerusalem who spurred him to genocide. My reluctance to resort to Freud aside, there are some striking similarities to the world his father fashioned as a historian; and it is worth considering the consequences of applying a midcentury historical model of the fifteenth century to twentieth-century teleologies of a twenty-first century conflict. I’m surprised this hasn’t come up sooner in the backlash against Netanyahu’s remarks.

In the academic circles in which I travel, Netanyahu Pere is not considered to have been  a first-rate historian. The Origins is recognized as a monumental work, but also as perhaps the apogee of what Salo Baron criticized as the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” predicated upon a kind of eternal Jewish suffering. Baron ushered in a glass-half-full approach to Jewish history, while Netanyahu remained steadfastly with his glass half empty, famously reducing Jewish history to “a history of holocausts.”

The Origins is two separate, yet intertwined, things: First, it is a religious history that centers the source of the Spanish Inquisition in a doctrinally, spiritually-motivated, historic hatred of Jews rather than a racial one. Second, it is a universalizing history, the kind that tries to situate the experience of the Jews in medieval Spain within the wider experience of the Jews of the rest of Europe and, ultimately, the Jews of the rest of history. He traces the roots of the Spanish Inquisition back to Greece, Rome, and Egypt. Josephus’ Against Apion was not just a book that spoke to the interests of Spanish Jews; it was their own history. Benzion Netanyahu’s historiography, at least in part, sought to make distal causes (both temporal and spiritual) proximate.

By attempting to trace a direct cause of a European genocide back in time and across space, Netanyahu Fils sublimates its proximate and tangible causes to a far more abstract, essentialized, and universal picture. By focusing upon a Muslim agent while informed by a contemporary conflict (largely) between Muslims and Jews, he deploys his own experience of the world to cast hatred of Jews a primordial phenomenon and a religious one rather than a question of race with specific and local historic antecedents. The ends and the context are, of course, very different from each other, but this is also quite clearly an entry into his father’s school of historical thinking.

Benyamin Netanyahu has very directly and actively tried to leverage his father’s work to further his own agenda within the political arena. Yet while doing that and claiming that his father’s work was amongst his greatest influences, he has alternately claimed that his father’s work had no influence upon his own political career; it is a contradiction that does seem to invite an exploration of the Freudian tension in the Netanyahu School, as goes the father, so goes the son. Bad history is bad history, and written or lived, perhaps that is what is the only universal thing.

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Book Review: Al-Andalus Rediscovered: Iberia’s New Muslims

Marvine Howe. Al-Andalus Rediscovered: Iberia's New Muslims. London: Hurst and Co., 2012. (A US edition is available from Oxford University Press USA.)

For medievalist readers, especially for medievalist readers with more than a passing interest in how medieval Spain functions as a trope in the modern world, Marvine Howe’s Al-Andalus Rediscovered: Iberia’s New Muslims, falls far short of the seductive promise of its title. By and large a reported social history of the poorest and most desperate Muslim immigrants to Spain and Portugal, the book studies a the population that hardly views its migration to the Iberian Peninsula as part of a recreation of a medieval myth; it’s a group of men and women just trying to get by in a world where Andalusi fantasies are a luxury. The book is interesting if not superbly well-written — it could have stood one more serious round of editing for style, for transliteration, and for the slightly unidiomatic international-English koine adopted subconsciously over time by foreign correspondents and academics. But it is not really what it claims to be.

Neo-medieval kitsch.
Neo-medieval kitsch.

The book is, in effect, a very long-form reported journalistic feature story about the status of Muslim immigrants to Spain and Portugal and the kinds of institutions that have grown up to support their integration, as well as the institutional and personal resistance that integration has faced. Both in chapters on the literate, educated, skilled immigrants who have had the greatest role in building up Islamic institutions in the Iberian Peninsula and those on the less-educated and unskilled ones from Islamic countries directly across the Strait of Gibraltar and from ones that were formerly part of the Spanish and Portuguese empires a bit farther afield, the book is largely focused on the integration of immigrants into a new civil society. That they are Muslims in a nominally Catholic country is secondary to the socio-economics of the situation, and that the concept of convivencia in its term-of-art, Jews-Christians-Muslims sense might be a productive, or at least provocative, lens through which to view this anthroposcape, are both very secondary considerations.

There are the obligatory references to the renewed optimism about religious toleration and integration brought about by the 500th anniversary of the fall of Granada in 1992 and to Osama bin Laden’s claim that he wanted to restore the caliphate as far as al-Andalus. But with the exception of one lament-for-the-city-style Friday sermon transcribed out in the book (p.115) there is little sense of a historical cognizance amongst the people living day-to-day in what used to be al-Andalus. Nor does the book offer the possibility of that kind of cognizance to the reader; staying with the same example, there is no indication of how that sermon fits into a long tradition of literary laments over the loss of al-Andalus. So, too, when Howe writes about the troubles that the Muslim communities of Granada faced when they tried to build a mosque, troubles that echoed the historic precedent of limiting the construction of minority-religious houses of worship to a shorter height than those of the majority religion, a precedent that was enforced against mosques in periods of Christian rule and against churches in periods of Islamic rule. Howe is far more interested in in the intracommunal squabbling amongst Granada’s two main Muslim factions (one of which is part of a larger movement called the Murabiṭūn (p. 128 and following), a term that goes uncommented despite its watershed significance in Andalusi history) than she is in the historic Andalusi precedent for the troubles that they faced, for this kind of unfortunate and inadvertent rediscovery of the tensions, and not just the dream, of al-Andalus.

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The modern Friday mosque in Granada.

It is also worth noting that mistakes in terminology and etymology — she explains erroneously that marrano, a derogatory term applied to Jewish converts, is the Hebrew word for swine when it is in fact a perfectly good and obviously Spanish word with that meaning — reinforce the reader’s sense that the book could never have achieved what it set out to be for lack of historical and linguistic contextualization.

At the same time, the disjunct between the title and the content of the book is, in and of itself an interesting indication of the power of the mythic al-Andalus in the popular imagination: somebody in the publishing house obviously thought that throwing that name into the title of a book that’s not really about that at all would attract readers, and that somebody can’t just have had six medievalists in mind as that target demographic. Even though the text of the book does not demonstrate it, the production of the volume at least says a little something about the appeal of the concept.

There are other problems, too, besides the let-down of getting past the title. Howe very much casts Spain as the villain and Portugal as the hero in terms of their treatment of Muslim immigrants; as a medievalist it is difficult for me to assess the extent of the truth in that vision, but anyone trained to read chronicles as something deeper than spy-vs-spy, the consistent cheering on of the Portuguese efforts and the condemnation of the Spanish ones raises a note of skepticism. I have no illusions about the capacity of Spanish society to be unwelcoming to foreigners and to the minorities in its midst, but as a scholar I have trouble believing a narrative that casts Spain as the unrelenting villain and Portugal as the great white hope.

Ultimately, it is those rigid distinctions between categories that sunder the book for what it is, and not just for what it might have been but failed to be. Many of Howe’s interviewees consistently distinguish between Spaniards, Jews, and Muslims, and she adopts that distinction uncritically and even uncommented. One of the non-governmental organizations profiled published a position paper encouraging “acceptance by Spaniards of the history of Muslim Spain as their own history” (126) but there appears to be no follow through, in real life or in the book. She lets comments like “we don’t pray to the same god” (179) slide even though it would offer an opportunity to introduce the concept of a single Abrahamic god so crucial to the kind of civil society and religious cultures to which she wishes to hearken back. It was especially shocking to me to see the head of the Madrid Jewish community himself distinguish between Spaniards and Jews, as though one cannot be Spanish and a Jew: “Israel Garzón, a youthful sixty-five, told me that I had not seen many Jews in my travels because they are well integrated… they look Spanish and speak Spanish” (171). Was Howe expecting to find Spanish Jews speaking Hebrew? Not even the Jews who lived in medieval Spain spoke Hebrew as an every-day language. Truly disappointing, though, to see Howe sign on to that distinction over and over again — another interviewee informs a credulous Howe that “the majority of Muslims are not radical, just as the majority of Spaniards accept diversity” (198) — rather than interrogate or unpack it. It is a terminological problem that reflects the issues right at the heart of the question of convivencia and of the promise and problems of the communal historic memory of al-Andalus. The notion that a Jew or a Muslim cannot be a Spaniard, that there is some inherent difference between the two that must be ferreted out, dates back to the fourteenth century and is, at its core, deeply inquisitorial. (For more on this, see David Nirenberg’s relatively new Neighboring Faiths.) A reporter writing about religion and culture should be more sensitive to that and a book premised upon the reinvention of al-Andalus in the modern world must be cognizant of it.

I had chosen to read this book as a possible text for my seminar on medieval Spain in modern fiction; my hope was that I could use it to offer students context on how al-Andalus functions as a significant trope in the contemporary world. It will not serve that purpose. This coming year I will also be leading a section of the Presidential Honors Scholars program here at NYU on religious conflict and coexistence in Spain. The program is designed to be research enrichment for students with top standing in the sophomore class, ultimately leading to their pursuit of research grants and writing honors theses when they are seniors. This may prove to be a useful book in that context, though. It will give the honors students some basic sense of the current state of Muslim immigrants in Spain and Portugal, and will also be an instructive model for how not to write about some of the thornier cultural problems that they find (or, crucially, do not) themselves facing in contemporary Spain.