Nahmanides in Medieval Catalonia: History, Community, and Messianism

Notes

181 Notes Notes to the Introduction 1. Nahmanides has been characterized by modern scholars as the rare leader who could maintain amicable relations with Christian leaders and with multiple factions within the Jewish communities. Three dominant themes emerge in this literature: Nahmanides’ contribution to and interpretation of Kabbalah, a comparison between Nahmanides’ and Maimonides’ interpretive and leadership methods, and Jewish-Christian relations and polemics. Some recent examples of the former two include the following (I will address the final category separately): Henri Atlan, “Rationalisme et théologie: Maïmonide et Nahmanide,” Les nouveaux cahiers 118 (1994): 5–14; Menachem Lorberbaum, Politics and the Limits of the Law: Secularizing the Political in Medieval Jewish Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Josef Stern, “The Fall and Rise of Myth in Ritual: Maimonides versus Nahmanides on the Huqqim, Astrology, and the War against Idolatry,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6 (1997): 185–263; Elliot R. Wolfson, “‘By Way of Truth’: Aspects of Nahmanides’ Kabbalistic Hermeneutic,” AJS Review 14, no. 2 (1989): 103–178; Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Secret Garment in Nahmanides,” Da’at 24 (1990): xxv–xlix; P. Christopher Smith, The Hermeneutics of Original Argument: Demonstration, Dialectic, Rhetoric (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998); Haviva Pedaya, Ha-Ramban: Hitalut—Zeman Mahzori ve-Tekst Kadosh (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2003). 2. In particular see Yom Tov Assis, Jewish Economy in the Medieval Crown of Aragon, 1213–1327: Money and Power (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997); Yom Tov Assis, The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon, 1213–1327 (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997); Leila Berner, “On the Western Shores: The Jews of Barcelona during the Reign of Jaume I, ‘el Conqueridor,’ 1213–1276” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1986);MarkD.Meyerson,A JewishRenaissanceinFifteenth-CenturySpain(Princeton , NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Mark D. Meyerson, Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom: Society, Economy, and Politics in Morvedre, 1248–1391 (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista and the Jewish Community of Medieval Iberia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). For a similar approach to Jewish communities in Castile, see Nina Melechen, “Loans, Land, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Archdiocese of Toledo,” in Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle Ages: Studies in Honor of Robert I. Burns, ed. Larry J. Simon (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995); Nina Melechen, “The Jews of Medieval Toledo: Their Economic and Social Contacts with Christians from 1150 to 1391” (PhD dissertation, Fordham University, 1999). 3. María Rosa Menocal’s recent study of medieval Iberian culture straddles the line between popular and scholarly analysis. While her understanding and interpretation of the literary culture of medieval Al-Andalus are unassailable, her tendency to apply the same interpretive paradigm to politics, social life, and economics perhaps overly romanticizes interfaith relations in medieval Iberia. See María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002). 4. Perhaps the best example of this can be found in Yitzhak Baer’s work. Though he objected to Americo Castro’s formulation of the dynamics as convivencia , Baer mobilizes a very similar set of assumptions in his work on medieval Spanish Jewry. At the very foundation of his argument is the claim that Jewish comfort or acculturation in medieval Christian Spain—especially among the political and economic elite—provided the very conditions that made the persecution and later expulsion of Jews from Spain seem necessary to the Christian authorities in the late fifteenth century. See Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain: From the Reconquest to the Fourteenth Century, trans. Louis Schoffman, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961), 2:444–456. 5. Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th–20th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), xxv–liv; Jane Gerber, The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 59–144; Menocal, The Ornament of the World. 6. By now there are numerous critical analyses of the assumptions and methods of convivencia studies. Many of these critiques call for moderation and objectivity in the portrayal of medieval Iberia. Since 2001, what is at stake in responsibly representing the medieval Iberian past has changed dramatically. During a period when the phrase ‘conflict of civilizations’ is regularly used in the popular media to describe relations...