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  • History of a Tragedy: The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain
  • David Graizbord
Joseph Pérez . History of a Tragedy: The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Intro. by Helen Nader. Trans. Lysa Hochroth. Hispanisms 6. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007. xvi + 150 pp. index. append. $35. ISBN: 978–0–252–03141–0.

The book under review is a brief essay and historical synthesis. Its central thesis is that Castile and Aragon expelled their Jewish populations in 1492 because that year finalized the transformation of Spain into a relatively unexceptional, early modern state in which the principle of cuius regio, eius religio triumphed. Tolerating Jews "no longer made sense" (100) after the Reconquest, since Jews' communal autonomy, and the ambiguity of New Christians' loyalties, were now incompatible with the un-medieval goals of socioreligious cohesion and the consolidation of monarchical power. Underlying this thesis is a straightforward reading of the edicts of expulsion, which proclaim that fraternization between Jews and New Christians made the latter's full integration impossible. Pérez does not discount the role of religious ideology in laying the groundwork for the expulsion. [End Page 1330] He shows, for instance, that the Inquisition produced the cultural and textual templates of the general expulsion edicts. Still, he contextualizes Judeophobia as a contributing cause, cautioning that it surfaced principally as a symptom of socioeconomic and political instability — notably, "class struggle" (56) — before the period of state-consolidation under the Catholic monarchs. So, too, he asserts, religious and ethnic bigotry masked political and social motives with predictable regularity.

The essay brings together a number of untraditional, if not particularly new, conclusions: for instance, that at least before the late 1400s Spanish Jews did not specialize in commerce and moneylending, comprised a small proportion of all tax collectors, and lived primarily in rural areas. These salutary conclusions counter an old-fashioned historiography according to which the Jews' roles in the urban economy explain Spanish Judeophobia, and the expulsion deprived Spain of its native middle class, thereby condemning the country to eventual decline. Pérez engagingly tackles competing explanations for the expulsion, such as monarchical greed for Jewish assets — "Jews were more of interest [to the crown] as taxpayers, but taxes disappeared with the expulsion of taxpayers" (91) — and the Marxist notion of rivalry between landed nobles and an emerging, Jewish middle class — "[Jews] worked in the service of, and in collaboration with, the grandees who needed them" (94). He also provides some elegant expositions of historical developments, for example, of the crescendo in Judeophobic activity of 1391 to 1414 and attendant demographic changes.

The problem is that too much of the work makes its sensible case by simple assertion, not by explication and meticulous presentation of evidence. To cite but one random example, no examples or endnotes are provided to support the contention that "The most frequent accusations against Jewish lenders were motivated by a desire to have loans dismissed" (38), and not by a religious animosity. First, it is not clear why one explanation should exclude the other. Second, to dismiss religious and ethnic hostility as mere excuses for other motives rings simplistic, and avoids the more interesting and difficult challenge of dissecting complex and highly specific relationships between culture and social conditions here and elsewhere in the work. Third, to return to the point, assertions such as the one quoted — indeed, whole sections of the book — deserve elaboration, illustration, and sufficient documentation. Several endnotes provide commentary but no corresponding sources. Important contributions by Beinart, Gutwirth, Nirenberg, Contreras, and many others, especially scholars of Jews and Judaism, receive no attention.

These flaws make for a particularly shallow, uneven treatment of internal Jewish life. For instance, in trying to debunk unrealistic images of medieval pluralism, the work overreaches by proposing that in medieval Spain Jews had "no separate Jewish culture as such" (11, see also 27), insofar as "nothing" (6) distinguished them from the rest of the population "apart from religion" (6; see also 11, 65), and that Maimonides was "in every way" (14) a representative of Ibero-Arabic, not Ibero-Jewish culture. These categorical statements arbitrarily ignore Jewish [End Page 1331] ethnicity as a basis of the...

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