The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 297 to and 21o), Receuil ~ l'usage des prkdicateurs in an Auxerre manuscript (211), and a Latin-Arabic Glossarypreserved in a single Leiden manuscript (2a1). The estimate to be made of this Work must be all but totally positive. The complex organization of the volume can make difficulties, despite a useful index; Tolan's reference to "five" authentic works perhaps includes the De Machometo (2o5, 21o) since only four, Dialogi, Zij al-Sindhind, Epistolaadperipateticosand Disciplinaclericalishave survived his scrutiny. Tolan has conveyed deftly the fluid quality of a mediaeval book. Copied and recopied for readers whose varied interests might inspire additions and omissions, a mediaeval treatise might be reworked by the author himself (as Abelard did) and no longer be the book that it was. Alfonsian studies have been advanced by Tolan's urbane estimate of these works and of their reception by Latin Europe in the twelfth-century struggle to share the scientific and cultural achievements of Judaism and Islam. EDWARD A. SYNAN Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and Universityof Toronto Raymond B. Waddington and Arthur H. Williamson, editors. The Expulsion of theJews: r492 andAfler. Garland Studies in the Renaissance, Volume 2. New York: Garland Publishing, t994. Pp. x + ~96. Cloth, $48.oo. In t992 there were many conferences commemorating the expulsion of the Jews from Spain five hundred years earlier. The collection under review, selected from papers presented at a conference held at the University of California, Davis, in April 1992, is one of the most interesting, containing a wide range of articles (fifteen in all) dealing with history, philosophy, and religion in Spain and elsewhere in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The collection shows the impact on intellectual history of the dramatic collapse of Spanish Jewry, and the impact of Jewish and anti-Jewish ideas thereafter all over the European world. It seems to confirm what Pierre Mesnard said almost thirty years ago after I presented a paper on "The Spanish Inquisition and the Rise of Modern Philosophy" at the Renaissance Center in Tours, France, namely, that we now have to consider that it was not the developments in Constantinople in a453 that transformed the European intellectual world, but rather the events in Iberia in 1492. The catastrophe of the Spanish Jews and its effect on Jews throughout Europe led, as the editors say in their introduction, "to utterly unprecedented cultural interpenetrations that reshaped both Judaism and the various Christianities which emerged in the sixteenth century. This interaction in turn led to profound and creative reflection, both Jewish and Christian, that shaped in important ways the intellectual and spiritual directions of early modern Europe" (1). Jewish ideas affected Christian intellectuals in France, Italy, Germany, and even Scotland and Sweden, which hardly had any Jewish inhabitants. The interaction "laid the foundation.., of the greatest achievement of post-medieval Europe, the creation of secular modes of discourse" (2). 298 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:~ APRIL 1996 The articles, some based on new archival information, enrich our understanding of what happened in Spain and Portugal, and in the rest of Europe as a result. Those of most interest for intellectual historians are, first, Willis Monter's exploration of what happened to both Jewish and Moslem communities in Spain in the first decade after the Expulsion, showing how the coexistence of these communities with Christianity was abolished. Next, Jerome Friedman presents an intriguing piece about the new religious alternatives that New Christian scholars discovered in sixteenth-century Europe, alternatives that represented new forms of Christianity and Judeo-Christianity. John H. Edwards explores antireligious and irreligious archival documents from Soria in the second half of the fifteenth century. These indications of what popular belief was like, how close it was to a complete rejection of Judaism and Christianity, have to be taken seriously in the present discussion about the development of atheism in modern thought. Obviously popular views are not the same as philosophical or theological ones. But the evidence of popular disbelief from Spain, Italy, England, and elsewhere has to be considered in juxtaposition with what intellectuals of the same time were saying. Waddington's article on graven images depicting leading New Christian figures helps dispel the too...