The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon, 1213-1327 (review)

256ReviewsLa coránica 33.1, 2004 Assis, Yom ???. The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon, 1213-1327. Portland, Liftman Library ofJewish Civilization. 1997. 380 pp. ISBN 1-874774-04-8 This study is essential for anyone working in Medieval Iberian Studies. In it Yom ??? Assis presents in great detail a portrait ofJewish communities, both large and small, in the Crown of Aragon, during the century of their greatest cultural achievement. Assis's meticulous research ofboth the Responsa and epistolar)· correspondence of leading intellectuals of the period such as Ibn Adret and Nahmanides and legal documents (in both Romance and Hebrew) of the archives of Barcelona, Mallorca, Zaragoza and Valencia -the centers of intellectual life during this period of intense activity- provides us with a more detailed portrait of many facets ofJewish life than that found in previous studies, such as Yitzhak Baer's History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1978, cl961). While Assis presents us with a plethora of suggestive facts that sometimes read more like a list than a comprehensive narrative, much of the information in this study is made available for the first time in print, and with it we can significantly add to our growing knowledge of the cultural history of the medieval Iberian Peninsula. The thirteenth centurv was a period of transition during which the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Aragon -Christian, Muslim and Jew alikeadapted to the changing social and political realities that the shift from Arabic to Christian rule entailed. The thirteenth century was also, as Yom ??? Assis makes clear, the period of most intense and spectacular cultural achievement of the Jews of Aragon, the so-called "Golden Age," during which the kingdom of "Aragon was the leading center of learning in the Jewish world" (308). The literary, philosophical and social advances of Aragonese Jews include the formation of democratic communal representation and communal schools designed for students of all socio-economic levels, the poetic and prose works of innovative authors, as well as Cabalistic and legal documents penned by some of the luminaries of the Jewish tradition . Jewish cultural production in the Crown of Aragon serves as a microcosm for the larger cultural flourishing that occurred in thirteenth-century Aragon (evidenced bv writers such as Francesc Eiximenis, Arnau de Vilanova, and Ramón Llull) and underscores the cultural and political importance of a region still largely ignored by Hispanists who tend to focus on Castile. The book is organized into six general sections that range from the legal-political to the religious, focusing on the broad theoretical models of U CORÓNICA 33.1 (Fall, 2004): 256-60 Reviews257 institutional organization as well as the specifics of individual Jew's daily lives. The six general areas -each addressing an aspect of Jewish life- are further divided into smaller subsections and provide a portrait of the community , showing how it was seen and used by the king and how it saw itself and its own members. The book also includes two appendices, one explaining the monetary system used in the different regions ofthe Crown ofAragon, and the other a genealogy of the kings of Aragon. In the first section, "Legal and Political Conditions" (9-66), Assis discusses the rights ofJews as subjects of the Christian kings of Aragon. The Jews were first appreciated by Jaume I as colonizers for the newly conquered lands of Mallorca and Valencia. Until the reign of Pere III they were prominent courtiers, statesmen, interpreters and physicians in the royal court. Pere III attempted to centralize royal authority by excluding the aristocracy and using Jewish courtiers as civil servants. In 1283 the aristocracy refused to help the Crown fight the invading French forces unless the king agreed to exclude members of this religious minority from political positions, which he did. "This was a turning-point in the history of the Jews in the Crown of Aragon, the beginning of a decline in their status and the first stage of a process that was to end in massacres, forcible conversions, and destruction" (14). Former Jewish courtiers and statesmen, largely excluded from court life after 1283, became prominent as...