Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic Spain (review)

As tensions among Jews, Muslims, and Christians continue to manifest themselves in the Middle East and other parts of the world, academic interest in the co-existence (convivencia) of these groups in medieval Muslim Spain has surged. Popular treatments of convivencia, no doubt shaped by contemporary yearnings for peace, often romanticize this interaction. More careful studies, however, give due attention to the literary evidence of inter-communal tensions in al-Andalus. This book, by the Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies and Chair of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University, is clearly to be included in the latter category.

Brann divides his study into five essays, which are preceded by an introduction in which he sets forth his methodological assumptions. Recognizing the complexity of the tribal, ethnic, socio-economic, factional, and, of course, religious "cleavages" that beset al-Andalus, Brann from the outset sets his scope narrowly on the relations between the Jewish minority and the Muslim majority during the "Golden Age" of Jewish civilization in medieval Spain, i.e., the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Even after thus carefully limiting his purview, he notes that the few select literary sources to be examined will enable him only to uncover "the ambivalence with which Andalusi Jewish and Muslim literary and religious intellectuals thought of, or more precisely, imagined one another," not to "advance broad or unsupportable claims for the experience of the Jews under all of Mediterranean Islam" (p. 8). Yet Brann maintains that these texts are not merely individual in their significance but rather "represent structures of sociocultural and historical signification" beyond the experiences of the authors themselves (p. 8), often revealing "more about the cultural situation of the scriptor's textual community than that of the depicted subject" (p. 9).

In his exegetical observations Brann shines in various ways: in his selection of texts to be examined, in his elaboration of their content, in his description of their historical context, and in his interpretation of their rhetoric. His fresh translation of significant portions of these texts, some previously unavailable in English, in itself makes this book a valuable contribution. Each of the five chapters presents either a single text or several related texts that are somehow indicative of the ways in which Muslims and Jews perceived one another in al-Andalus. The first three chapters are related in that all focus on Ismail ibn Naghrila, perhaps the most noteworthy Jew of Islamic Spain, as portrayed by various Muslim authors.

Chapter 1 presents three eleventh-century texts: the Tabaqat al-umam of Ibn Said al-Andalusi, an account of Ibn Hayyan al-Qurtubi as transmitted in Ibn al-Khatib's Al-Ihata fi akhbar gharnata, and the Al-Tibyan of Abd Allah b. Buluggin. Although all of these texts depict Ibn Naghrila with a high degree of respect as a "model Jew" in the service of the Muslim state (the tendency is to transfer any negative assessments of Ismail to his son Yusuf), they manifest considerable variation, indicating the "unstable construction of the Jew in eleventh-century Andalus" (p. 53).

In Chapter 2, Brann turns to perhaps the most strident of medieval Spain's Muslim commentators on the Jews, Ali ibn Hazm, who depicts Ibn Naghrila as a "composite Jew," a typological figure, a "linguistic trope"of what Ibn Hazm considers to be all of the faults and sinister proclivities of the Jewish race, especially the Jews of al-Andalus. In this, the strongest chapter of his book, Brann guides the reader through Ibn Hazm's dense polemical universe, providing a good sense of its richness without allowing his reader to get lost amid its convolutions.

In Chapter 3, Brann provides a striking example of the conflicting attitudes of Andalusi Muslims toward their Jewish counterparts through an examination of Ibn Bassam's Treasury Concerning the Merits of the People of Iberia (Al-Dhakhira fi mahasin ahl al-jazira...