A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain (review)

Historians often animate the past with the lifeblood of the present: "As I pondered the wound inflicted on my own native city of New York [on 9/11], I wondered what these medieval Christians, Muslims, and Jews might teach us in a twenty-first century still plagued by enmity among adherents of the world's three great monotheistic religions." For readers unfamiliar with the history of medieval Spain, the resulting lesson may be surprising: the Muslims, Christians, and Jews of medieval Spain "haltingly blazed humanity's trail toward tolerance and mutual respect before finally veering into an overgrown thicket of religious enmity and intolerance." Perhaps "our era, suffering the same schizophrenia that afflicted our ancestors, might heal it by embracing the wisdom that . . . medieval contemporaries uncovered, yet never fully grasped." This book is filled with vivid anecdotes delightfully narrated, but it cannot discover for us a psychotropic medication, since it is itself the product of a bipolar tradition. For centuries, Spanish medieval history has either been presented as an epic "clash of civilizations," a battle to the death between Christianity and Islam, or as an "angenehmes Märchen" (as Herder put it in the late eighteenth century)—a "comforting fairy tale" about a time and place in which Islam, Christianity, and Judaism were intimately embraced. Like many today, the author of A Vanished World is attracted to the "far away and long ago" as a source of antidotes to conflicts of the present age. But however comforting, the resulting fairy tales will be necessarily puzzled by their own unhappy endings.