The last Jews on Iberian soil: Navarrese Jewry 1479-1498 (review)

202 Reviews the early Middle Ages at all. Instead a longue durei anti-gravity world is imagined (in the manner of Jacques Le Goff, Jean-Claude Schmitt and Carlo Ginzburg), where one can jump around all over the place, ignoring to a large extent temporal and cultural specifics in proving the point. This is a grave enor. It is the political and social tempo of a community that provides the rhyme for all magical reason. Instead of elaborating a rationaUty out of the communities that made up early medieval Europe, Flint has adopted the pervasive 'reason' of the early m o d e m world, and the early modernist that angered her in the first place. This is a serious and subtle issue, easier to criticize than to practise, that affects and afflicts all historians, not just medievalists. Whatever the case, Flint's book has given all scholars a starting-place from which to rethink the unthinkable, to re-imagine what is reasonable, not only in the past but also within ourselves. Mark Gregory Pegg Department of History Princeton University Gampel, Benjamin R., The last Jews on Iberian soil: Navarrese Jewry 14791498 , Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990; cloth; pp. xi, 226; R.R.P. US$32.00. This is an interesting book which documents the last century of Navanese lewry, a Jewry which was about 3.5% of the population of the Kingdom, and the events which led to its expulsion in 1498, six years after the Jews had been expelled from the rest of Christian Iberia. In examining the life and organization of Navanese Jewry the author considers the problem of whether this was a Jewry in decline, whether it was losing or had lost its influence after six centuries of continuous presence in the Kingdom at a time when the Jewries of Castile and Aragon were facing considerable difficulty. It is not clear that this is the prime or dominating object of the research since the wealth of detail in the work makes it a little inchoate at times, even though the text is very well documented both in that it draws extensively on primary source material and in that it is copiously annotated. The impression becomes quite compeUing after a time that the source documents themselves are biased in favour of ptreserving the records of a small number of famities so that there is ariskthat the overall picture is not a gestalt view. This impression is strengthened when one counts the number of families represented in the index to the text This is probably a much smaller number than it should have been if the account were properly representative of so large a Jewry. The author shows that Jews were important to the financial administrations of the cities, towns and villages in which they Uved and were involved in rich and diverse economic activities. However, copious details of the activities of Reviews 203 individuals are provided without ever trying tofitthem into a broader description of the Navanese economy so that w e could understand the proper significance of Jewish activity in the kingdom. N o attempt is made to describe the overallfiscalsystem to show how the Jewsfittedin to Navanese society and economy. It would surely have helped the reader estimate the significance of Jewish economic activity if some sort of contemporary equivalent value had been given for the prices and quantities cited in describing trade; for example, what does twenty six groats per dozen say about the price of hides and what is the significance of twenty two rouas of hemp (p. 30). Explanations of official positions which are described only by their original Spanish name would also have been useful. Having offered these criticisms, there is a wealth of data in this study, and at least it describes the fuU range of economic activities of the Jews and gives us a detailed demographic survey. This data will support much further study of the JewsofNavane. Certainly, the author has made his case that the end of Navanese Jewry was almost banal and accidental. There is no indication in the economic record that lews were at their last gasp of residence in the peninsula and there is...