The Rhetoric of Impurity in Medieval Iberia

Abstract

Aside from certain food taboos, most people in the Middle Ages, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, ate a similar diet, based on their economic status. Yet, as early as the thirteenth century in Spain, rules were being established to prohibit commensality. Medieval Iberian legal codes and religious ordinances against commensality use a rhetoric of impurity and vice that have its roots in classical and ancient traditions. In this article, I will examine the history of the rhetoric of impurity as it relates to food and its impact on the diets of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Iberian Middle Ages. I explain how religious authorities used food restrictions to advance their vision of the proper social order. I will also show how the conflation of racial prejudice and food practices created nationalistic discourses that continue to this day.

Albert Memmi writes that in its extreme, racism merges into myth (176).¹ Medieval Iberia gave birth to many myths: a paradise of tolerance, the seed of the Black Legend, and, to many theorists, the birth of modern racism. Myth does not signify untruth; it signifies, rather, a convenient story in which complexities are erased. Nation building requires origin myths; stories that define a people and justify actions that could be interpreted as racializing or, at the very least, acts of "stigmatization" (Harney 6). Maintaining these myths throughout history, however, requires a constant dismantling of inconvenient truths.

To discuss race in the Middle Ages, according to Michael Harney, is to be guilty of anachronism (3). But the tie between the notion of race, with its concomitant notions of impurity, is given voice in the annals of the Inquisition, the Edict of Expulsion, antisemitic chronicles, and other medieval texts with the systematic conflation of cultural and religious beliefs.

David Freidenreich writes that Jewish, Christian and Islamic authorities employ similar "scholastic modes of thinking, imagined conceptions of foreigners, and techniques of textual interpretation" (Foreigners 224). These similarities are even greater among those who live in a common intellectual culture. In medieval Iberia, commonalities existed not only in the intellectual culture, but in the culture of consumption.

Most people in medieval Iberia, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, ate a similar diet, based on their economic status. Poorer people made do with legumes, vegetables, and bread. Wealthier people had a steady diet of a variety of meats, cheeses, and other delicacies. However, a separation of cultures and religions has often relied upon what Madera Allen calls "culinary allegiance" (25). Long before Alfonso X's Siete Partidas forbade commensality between Jews and Christians, Jews were already practicing food segregation. The act of commensality, however, is at the heart of Christianity. The promotion of an Us versus Them mentality regarding food choices in the Middle Ages seems to be in direct contrast with the ecumenical culture of consumption in Christianity.

The rhetoric of impurity and vice can be linked to the promotion and prohibition of consumption and eating habits from centuries before the Middle Ages. Impurity rhetoric can be divided into three categories: intrinsic, circumstantial (polluted), and offensive (defiled) (Freidenreich, Foreigners 40). Much can be learned from the ways in which these categories were employed to destroy commensality. Christians were more likely to condemn foods for their circumstantial impurity, which meant that a food could be contaminated by its proximity to an undesirable element. Unlike Judaism and Islam, there were no foods that were intrinsically impure to Christians. Circumstantial pollution for medieval Jews had to do with unclean practices such as meat coming into contact with blood and unclean cooking and butchering processes. Similarly, Muslims required their own butchering techniques but had fewer food restrictions. Considering food offensive or defiled was based on the likelihood that a particular food or drink was used in an idolatrous ceremony, which was condemned by all three religions (Freidenreich, Foreigners 96). However, much of the impurity rhetoric that Christians employed in the mid to late Middle Ages focuses on offensive acts performed mainly by Jews regarding food and consumption.

In thirteenth-century Castile, religious communities were increasingly divided by laws and in legal texts. On issues concerning economics and jurisprudence, Jews found themselves on a relatively even playing field. On questions of daily convivencia, however, the rules changed drastically (Borgognoni 64). Legal manifestations of Christian hegemony in documents such as the fueros not only reinforced prohibitions of commensality, but also sexual relations between Christians and Jews, and prohibitions of childcare between the religions (65). Multiple fueros not only prohibited commensality but also the sale of meats by Jews to Christians, most particularly during the three days before and the three days after Easter and Christmas (León Tello 229). The prohibitions in the fueros were part of a larger anti-Jewish legislation in the thirteenth century, which also manifested in Church law. For example, Canons 67-70 of the Fourth Lateran Council sought further to distinguish Jews, Muslims, and Christian. Canon 68, for example, legislated that "Jews and Saracens" of both sexes be distinguished in the way that they dress. Canon 69 prohibited Jews from holding public office, and Canon 70 prohibited converts from demonstrating any allegiance to their old rites.²

Julio Rodríguez Puértolas writes that by the fourteenth century, antisemitism became institutionalized throughout Castile and that by the fifteenth century, it had reached "mythical proportions when it combined with an imagined Hispanic racial purity" (193). According to David Nirenberg, after the massacres of 1391, the mass conversions that followed "transformed the old boundaries and systems of discrimination" rather than abolishing them. Legal and religious distinctions were replaced with notions that "Christians descended from Jewish converts were essentially different from 'Christians by nature'" ("Was There Race" 242).

The use of impurity rhetoric served to successfully demonize both Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages, and food and consumption were focal points of such rhetoric. By the early fifteenth century, Muslims too were forbidden by Castilian laws from selling anything edible to Christians. Olivia Remie Constable notes that these prohibitions were especially pointed against olive oil, honey, and rice (208).

Along with the devaluation of dietary customs of Jews and Muslims comes an imperative to equate these customs with a biological inferiority. Immorality of consumption is conflated with the impurity of religious beliefs. Mary Douglas explains that food taboos are cultural expressions of the notions of purity and pollution in a particular society (Purity and Danger 2-25). Memmi writes that "the obsession with purity arises from a fear of pollution and a vow to obviate it" (67). Through the use of the rhetoric of impurity, particular foodstuffs became targeted as Christian or non-Christian, i.e., acceptable or unacceptable for consumption.

Christian condemnation of foods once considered staples of the diets of members of all three religions most often fell into the category of circumstantial pollution. Foods such as garbanzos and eggplants were marked as particular to Muslim and Jewish diets. To be called a berenjenero was a terrible insult in the fifteenth century (Gil 121-42). These common foods were marked as cosas viles, consumed by vile people who chose to ignore the "truth" of Christianity.

Many poems in the Cancionero collections of the fifteenth century satirize the Jews and their food choices. In the Cancionero de Baena, Rodrigo Cota describes a converso wedding at which guests were served eggplants, but no pork or fish without scales:

En la voda desta aljamano se comio peliagudoni pecado sin escamacon quanto el marido pudo;sino mucha verengenay açafran con alçelguilla.Quien Jesu diga en la çena,que no coma alvondiguilla.³

The poem demonstrates a link between the culturally ingrained eating habits of the Jews and conversos and their supposed faithlessness. In the Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes de risa, garbanzos, spinach, and eggplants make an appearance as part of the diet of the converso who has not fully committed to Christianity:

Trobád vuestros dineroscon razones no muy flacas,lindos garbanzos cocheros y jentiles espinacas…Trobád en plácticas buenasPor estas tales pasadas,En culantro y berengenas,Y castañas adobadas.

(88-89)

Although these verses were meant to be humorous, the satire lays bare social criticism. Bellón uses the word "obsessive" to describe the number of references to Jews and conversos in these poetry compilations (138).

It was the pork taboo, however, that became the flashpoint for the most vituperative rhetoric. Some of the earliest discussion about the pork taboo harkens back to the early Christian notion that the consumption of all foods is what defined Christians as "not-Jews" and "affirms the authority of the New Testament statements about food, such as 'For the pure all things are pure'" (Freidenreich, Foreigners 112).

The prohibition of Jewish food habits was one of the earliest building blocks of Iberian Christianity. Beginning in the fourth century at the Synod of Elvira (now Granada), commensality between Christians and Jews was noted as problematic. Canon 50 reads, "If any of the clergy of the Faithful eats with Jews, he shall be kept from communion in order that he be corrected as he should" (Adams). At the end of the sixth century, Judaism was treated as on par with paganism (Freidenreich, "Jews, Pagans" 80). To that end, forced baptism and enslavement followed, along with other anti-Jewish legislation, which included food habits. The twelfth-century Toledan council (681 CE), for example, allowed Jews to eschew pork, but they had to eat foods cooked in pork fat "as a token of good will" (Rabello 782).

In the twelfth century, the converso Petrus Alfonsi, in his Dialogue Against the Jews, uses his knowledge of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religious texts to argue against the pork taboo. Alfonsi claims that with the advent of Christ, "all meats ought to be permitted and eaten" (53). The twelfth Titulus of the Dialogue states, "As Christ came, however, and cleansed the bodies of believers by baptism and infused the fullness of the Holy Spirit, now the person's body cannot be defiled or dulled by any meat" (268). Christians, then, were allowed to eat all foods because of the inherent righteousness of their choice to follow Christ.⁴

Popular poetry satirized the diet of the Jews, especially when referencing the consumption of or abstention from pork. Nirenberg writes that accusing someone of Judaizing or being a Jew was just one typical insult in a poetry of insults ("Figures of Thought" 403-04). Judaism, along with poetic incompetence, ignorance, rudeness, and sexual deviance were negative poles of poetic virtues (415). An example of this kind of poetry can be found in the aforementioned Cancionero de Baena. Juan Alonso de Baena, a convert and poet, writes these words about a convert he believes still practices his original faith: "Presume de muy ufano/palanciano/quando va por el camino,/come berças de toçino,/el mezquino/por parescer a Cristiano," (785; Poem 588, stanza 12).⁵

In the later fifteenth century, however, the poetry lost its playfulness and became a poetry of loathing. "Poetry ceased to be a place in which hermeneutic good faith could be proven" (Nirenberg, "Figures of Thought" 423). In Antón de Montoro's diatribe on the woes of being a convert, he writes, "Hice el Credo y adorar, ollas de tocino grueso,/torreznos á medio asar,/oir misa y rezar,/santiguar y persignar,/y nunca pude matar/este rastro de confeso" (99). Montoro's efforts to demonstrate his Christian faith revolve around his need to ameliorate the sins of the tongue: he confesses, speaks the Creed, and he eats various types of pork. Regardless of these efforts, he is marked permanently as a Jew.

Many anti-Jewish treatises focused on the intrinsic impurity of the Jews. Irven Resnick cites a number of anti-Jewish treatises, including those of Petrus Comestor and Vincent of Beauvais, that associate the inherent sinfulness of the Jew with the low character of the pig ("Pig and Messianism" 77). These treatises reasoned that Jews did not eat pork because they shared many of the pig's characteristics and its vices. Claudine Fabre-Vassas writes that "the analogy of the Jew and the pig doesn't stop at appearances…the morphology reveals a hidden identity" (99-100). Characteristics attributed to Jews were bad smells, the way in which Jews walked, and hidden illnesses like leprosy (103). The word marrano, used for a new convert, was a synonym for pig and was used throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period to designate a Christian converted from Judaism. In France and Italy, modern meanings of marrano include difficult, treacherous, and vulgar (123). Usage of this term to refer to Jews and conversos reinforced the association of Jews with impurity.

On the other hand, converso and Jewish attempts to maintain ritual purity through keeping kosher was one of the factors that drew unwanted attention from Christians. The primary stated reason for the arrival of the Inquisition to Iberia was to root out false converts, especially among the Jews, and to, ostensibly, prevent "reversion" to old ways or contagion of Christians. Madera Allen writes that even years before the Tribunal was founded, keeping kosher was controversial (34). "The litmus test for religious loyalty," states Allen, "was dietary defilement" (46). Food and food practices became, then, one of the most common ways to distinguish between Us and Them. And to be one of "Them" was to face punishment, and, even, death. Inquisition trial testimonies are filled with accusations of Judaizing activities that involved food, including cooking casseroles and stews on Fridays, cleaning and preparing meat by cutting away fat or veins, refusing to eat strangled birds, and, of course, rejecting all pork products.

In the anti-converso screed Libro llamado el Alborayque written in the 1480s, the anonymous author condemns the new converts as neither Christian, nor Muslim, nor Jewish. He writes, "you will know them because they keep the Sabbath and eat meat during Lent" (Scholberg 352). Not all converts are condemned but, rather, those who converted through force. These were the monsters who not only did not truly believe, but also secretly worked against Christian conversion. The creature from which the work takes its name reflects this monstrosity associated with conversos: Alborayque comes from the name al-Burak, the flying horse that carried Muhammed from Mecca to Jerusalem in one night. Gitlitz writes that by the fourteenth century, the beast "took on aspects of griffins, centaurs, or sphinxes" (7). Gitlitz compares the hybrid Alborayque to the perceived hybridism of the forced convert whose main attribute is hypocrisy. The Alborayque's first attribute, the wolf's mouth, indicates, "son ypróquitas y falsos profetas, llamándose xrianos y no lo son; ca todo aquél ques uno y finge otro es ypóchrita" (392). Another sign of the forced convert or Alborayque is the kinds of foods they eat:

La décima quinta condición del Alborayque es que come de todos manjares. Ansí los alboraycos comen conejos, perdizes muertas de manos de christianos y de moros, y pescados, que ellos comen poco tocino, hebres y otros animales y aves [adafina]⁶ como judíos, y cómenlo en todo tiempo y en la quaresma de los xrianos y en el ayuno de los judíos y en el ayuno delos moros los más dellos, que pocos guardan las ceremonias delos otros.

(400-01)

Adafina, mentioned as one of the foods of the false convert, is a Sabbath stew made with rice or barley, meat, and vegetables. This stew is one of the most common markers of a Judaizing household, according to Inquisition testimonies (Gitlitz and Davidson 149, 157, 174). Other accusations against the forced convert are eating meat during Lent and following non-Christian fasting rituals.

Along with adafina, making and eating unleavened bread is also mentioned in trial testimonies. In the following example, Constanza Fernández was tried posthumously for the crimes mentioned above, along with preparing meat according to Judaic custom:

Constanza Fernández fue acusada en 1494, ya difunta, de haber guisado adafinas (guiso de carne, legumbres, verduras, huevos y especias, típico judío) el viernes, para tomarlo al día siguiente. También fue culpada de hacer pan sin levadura para la Pascua del pan cenceño. En efecto, las mujeres amasaban el pan y cocinaban tanto adafinas como otros guisos, el viernes para que toda la familia los consumiera el sábado. También tomaban carne de judíos y moros, degollada siguiendo sus ritos.

(Zozaya Montes 363)

Constanza prepared sabbath stews and unleavened bread, and Leonor Zozaya Montes notes that this was typical of Jewish women in fifteenth-century Iberia, who also cooked with a group of women who would prepare the adafina using meat bought from Jews or Muslims, on Fridays so that their families could eat it on Saturday (363).

Conversas became targets of the Holy Office soon after its establishment in Spain. Because they oversaw shopping and cooking and maintained the household and the kitchen, women were easier targets for spies, especially among their own servants. Food prohibitions and rituals surrounding food preparation were some of the most ingrained habits among Muslims and Jews. Along with these activities, other suspicious activities that were the sole dominion of the housewife were funeral rites, lighting candles, and providing medical attention to the family (Zozaya Montes 364).

Mary Elizabeth Perry writes that children of morisco families "had learned an embodied self-knowledge from certain Islamic rituals and Muslim cultural practices that would be considered apostasy" (185). Perry also mentions other prescriptions: "Both boys and girls learned Muslim taboos against consuming pork and, in some regions, wine" (186). And really it was the girls who learned how to prepare foods in oil rather than in fat, and learned domestic remedies, which later would be considered witchcraft (186). James Amelang writes that morisca women were known as dogmatizadoras, keepers of religious tradition (37). It is clear that they also were the keepers of culinary traditions that were part of the fabric of daily life.

In the Edict of Expulsion, we see the culmination, in some respects, of the persecution of Jews reflected in the anti-Jewish rhetoric used across Europe in the Middle Ages. According to the Edict, examples of nefarious Judaizing by converts included:

-subverting and stealing faithful Christians from our holy Catholic faith and to separate them from it, and to draw them to themselves and subvert them to their own wicked belief and conviction….

-and giving to them from their houses unleavened bread and meats ritually slaughtered, instructing them about the things from which they must refrain, as much in eating as in other things in order to observe their law …

(Peters n.p.)

In this text, the subversion of faithful Christians involves, among other crimes, encouraging commensality. The Jews and conversos continued to threaten "true" Christians, by allowing them to maintain their Jewish foodways.

The association between food and ritual, implicit in the consumption of kosher foods and unleavened bread during Passover, as mentioned in the Edict of Expulsion, plays an important role in the creation of a racializing mythology. Elements of this discourse can be found in the Libro llamado el Alborayque. The fourth sign of the Alborayque reads:

Quarta condición del Alborayque: havía orejas de perro lebrel. … que ansí como el perro no ha vergüenza de su señor de hazer sus haziendas delante dél … ansí estos hombres perros no han vergüenza de Dios ni aun de las gentes de hazer sus haziendas ni aun zerimonias judaicas, ni dezir sus eregías y mentiras. Y otro sí, como el perro torna al bómito y a comer lo que bosó, ansí estos canes tornan al sábado y circuncición y cerimonias que usaron ya quando se bautizaron.

(394)

The author compares the reversion of converts to their old ways to dogs returning to their vomit. Sins of the mouth again are associated with dirt and disorder. Resnick writes, "'Canine' gluttony would also produce moralizing links to Jews (or others), whose appetites are allegedly never satisfied. The dog's gluttony is reinforced by frequent retelling of the tale of the dog and its reflection, which can be traced back to Aesop's Fables" ("Good Dog" 76). Other characteristics assigned to dogs are their uncleanness and insatiable sexual appetite (78).

Harangues aimed at Muslims and moriscos often focused on offensive eating habits. In the fourteenth century, prohibitions against sharing food with Muslims grew, although Constable writes that there existed "some debate as to whether Muslims and Jews were equally disapproved as dining partners" (208). In the fifteenth century Muslims were increasingly accused of "Judaizing" their food, and their eating habits became a focus of opprobrium.

Although ecclesiastical authorities alternated between rigorous measures against the moriscos and leniency throughout the sixteenth century, these perceived lapses triggered summons by the Holy Office. Some of these lapses included: fasts, ablutions and, of course, dietary prohibitions, especially pork (Pearce 36). In 1612 Pedro Aznar Cardona, an Aragonese priest, wrote a treatise justifying the expulsion of the moriscos:

y como se mantenian todo el año de diversidad de frutas, verdes, y secas, guardadas hasta casi podridas, y de pan y de agua sola, porque ni bebian vino ni compravan carne ni cosa de caças muertas por perros, o en lazos, o con escopeta o redes, ni las comian, sino que ellos las matassen segun el rito de su Mahoma, por eso gastaban poco, assi en el comer como en el vestir…

(Part 2, chp. 10, fol. 33v).

He vilifies the moriscos for their brutos hábitos and condemns the rules of consumption found in the Qur'an. Similar rhetoric had been used a century earlier by Andrés Bernáldez, a priest and author of Historia de los Reyes Católicos don Fernando y doña Isabel. In this text, Bernáldez provides ample justifications for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. For him, as for many others, the Jews brought this punishment on themselves:

hediondos…tragones e comilones, que nunca dexaron el comer a costumbre judaica de manjarejos e olletas de adefinas e manjarejos de cebollas e ajos, refritos con aceite, e la carne guisavan con aceite, e lo echavan en lugar de tocino e de grosura, por escusar el tocino; e el aceite con la carne e cosas que guisan hace muy mal oler el resuello, e asi sus casas y puertas hedian muy mal a aquellos manjarejos; e ellos eso mesmo tenian el olor de los judios, por causa de los manjares e de no ser baptizados.

(97)

Bernáldez claims that despite converting to Christianity, new Christians of Jewish descent could not refrain from avoiding pork and from cooking instead with olive oil. This act, he claims, produced a bad smell, which he then associates with all Jews. Like Aznar Cardona had done in the case of the moriscos, Bernáldez links moral degeneracy with ingrained habits of consumption.

Jews and Muslims were accused simultaneously of being too abstemious and of being gluttonous. Constable writes that Muslims were considered both decadent and uncivilized, attractive and repulsive (221). Hernando de Talavera condemned excess in all things. His opinion of Muslims as sybaritic was only strengthened by their habit of consuming dried fruits. Figs and raisins, according to Constable, were two markers of Muslim cuisine. In her article about Enrique IV, she writes that the "king enjoyed foods such as figs, raisins, butter, milk, and honey" preferring the customs of Moors to those of the Christian religion (200). Eating quantities of dried fruits was seen as gluttonous because of the pleasure that could be had by sweet tastes (212). Sinful eating led to avarice, pride, and lust according to Talavera (Castro Martínez 390).

The copious use of spice had long been related to immorality and gluttony. The twelfth-century Benedictine Bernard of Clairvaux railed against spiced wines and fine dining, while Alain de Lille warned that too much fine dining (i.e., using spices and eating rich foods) could lead monks to homosexual temptations (Freedman 151-52). As the Muslim diet became more suspect in the fifteenth century for its supposed excess, "foreign" spices were also being questioned for their hedonistic character. King Ferdinand believed that there was nothing wrong with good old domestic garlic (Turner 285).

The official expulsion of the moriscos came in 1609 when an estimated 300,000 were forced to leave Spain, which precipitated an economic downturn. But more than that, it signaled the end of the diversity that had been inherent in the culinary habits of medieval Iberia. Evidence of this earlier diversity can be found in Francisco Delicado's La Lozana andaluza, written in 1528. Aldonza lives in Rome but pines for her childhood in Andalucía. In a moment of nostalgia, Aldonza describes how she learned to cook from her grandmother and gives us a culinary catalog of foods from the converso table:

Sabía hacer hojuelas, prestiños, rosquillas de alfajor, tostones de cañamones y de ajonjolí, nuégados, sopaipas, hojaldres, hormigos torcidos con aceite, talvinas, zahinas y nabos sin tocino y con comino; col murciana con alcaravea … Y cazuela de berengenas, … Rellenos, cuajarejos de cabritos, pepitorias y cabrito apedreado con limón ceutí. Y cazuelas de pescado cecial con oruga, y cazuelas moriscas por maravilla, y de otros pescados que sería luengo de contar.

(Delicado 178)

Constable suggests that Aldonza's grandmother was most likely a Muslim as the list consists of typically Muslim foods. However, these foods could have been found at Muslim or Jewish tables in Andalucía in the fifteenth century as well as in the Sephardic multi-cultural community she finds in Rome.

Consumption and food choices became part of the rhetoric against all sinful behavior. The link between Aldonza's sexual prowess and the lavish aspects of the foods she remembers, makes another connection between Muslim food and sexual appetite (Constable 218). This list of foods is strikingly similar to those foods condemned by moralists like Alfonso Martínez de Toledo and Francesc Eiximenis. Both believed that the consumption of sweets of all kinds, including fruits, was morally reprehensible. Making bad food choices could lead to other errors of faith.

This essay has argued that accusations begin with the way the communities of medieval Iberia nourished themselves. In Inquisitorial Spain, the conflation of cultural practices and religious beliefs became a steppingstone to a racializing agenda that was to define the sixteenth century. Constable calls it a morality of food choices: following a particular diet would mark one as moral or Christian, or immoral and non-Christian. Commensality among different religions or communities opens up the possibility not only of the defilement of one's food, but the defilement of one's soul. In late medieval and early modern Spain, what you ate and with whom became who you were.

The rhetoric of impurity has been used throughout history to marginalize certain sectors of society and justify prejudice and hatred. The conflation of cultural habits with race allows the creation of what Geraldine Heng calls "strategic essentialisms" that "construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment" (3). Accusations against Jews and Muslims start with the way in which they nourish themselves. The impurity of their food leads to immorality, both religious and sexual. From there, the entire household is compromised: ritual cleanings, table settings, lighting candles. The "disease" spreads to the community, infecting true converts and leading them back to their old ways. Finally, it is the burgeoning nation of Spain that bears the brunt of this alleged cancer.

According to Nirenberg, anti-converso ideologies of the fifteenth century coincided with "identifiably biological ideas about breeding and reproduction" ("Race and the Middle Ages" 79). The notions of purity and impurity constituted a large part of the campaign toward a homogeneous Christian Spain. The justifications for a racializing agenda often involve notions of impurity. Sang Hea Kil writes that "racial logics are essentially a fixation on disorder. Religion, science, and sexual purity are then 'ordered relations' or systems that fear and reject dirt" (183). The disorder begins with the body and ends with the nation (191-93).

The nativist rhetoric that appears in Iberia in the fifteenth century seeks to erase notions of religious, and therefore social, disorder. Food manuals in the early modern period move toward a more Eurocentric cuisine. Constable writes that the Christian perception of Muslim food and foodways became laden with conflicting meanings. Increasingly, Christians viewed Muslim foods as potentially heretical and their habits as odd or even barbarous (Constable 203). This change in consumption led also to changes in the agricultural economy of Iberia. Amelang writes, "adjustments included a move away from labor-intensive products such as rice, silk and sugar toward viticulture and livestock raising—part of a literal 'Christianization' of the economy after the departure of a more compact and subservient labor force" (24).

The antisemitic invective of the fifteenth century demonstrates the strong ties between food and identity. Food metaphors are part of a cultural discourse that surrounds us from childhood through adulthood (Memmi 112). Such discourse is evident in the Spanish proverbs that abound with references to Jews and pork:

Puerco en casa judía, hipocresía.Con misa ni tocino no convides al judío.No temblés tocino, decía el judío,que no hay en casa quien mal os haga.

(Martínez Kleiser 394-95)

The Spanish conflation of Jews and pigs reflects Mary Douglas's observation that, "it would seem that whenever a people are aware of encroachment and danger, dietary rules controlling what goes into the body would serve as a vivid analogy of the corpus of their cultural categories at risk" ("Deciphering" 52).

The use of impurity rhetoric to condemn the most integral acts of a particular culture is as common today as it was in the Middle Ages. During much of the twentieth century, the rhetoric used against African Americans in the United States connecting food to race not only affected the types of food that particular groups consumed, but also the manner in which it was consumed. Commensality between whites and African Americans was not only prohibited, but also implied a sinful nature. In October 1901, white Southern observers were outraged when President Theodore Roosevelt, his wife, and their young children dined with the African American educator Booker T. Washington (Cooley 75). In Ensley, Alabama, just outside Birmingham, Robert Riser describes the local newspapers' accusation that the president "invited an 'n-word' to eat with his family" (75). Another newspaper cited by Riser conflates a simple dinner with sexual intercourse by describing the president as a "miscegenationist" (75). In the twentieth-century South, one of the greatest "sins" that white people could commit was the act of "eating with Negroes" (71).

Like the rhetoric used against the Jews in the fifteenth century, white Southerners like Virginia Durr, a woman interviewed by Angela Jill Cooley, remarked that one could not eat with African Americans because "they were offensive, smelled bad, and were diseased" (Cooley 73). If we look back at Bernáldez's description of the Jews ("e asi sus casas y puertas hedian muy mal a aquellos manjarejos; e ellos eso mesmo tenian el olor de los judios, por causa de los manjares e de no ser baptizados"; 97), we can see that the trope of bad odors and disease is repeated.

Contemporary rhetoric in the U.S. continues the marginalization of other cultures by associating them with dirt and disorder, especially newly arrived immigrants. Andrew Elliott writes:

in this climate, the Middle Ages have become particularly fertile ground for the kinds of pseudo-scientific race theories espoused by white supremacist blogs and far-right nationalist groups. In their fantasy Middle Ages, the resistance of Islamic expansion by white European armies was brought about simply because of the natural supremacy of the white race.

("A Vile Love Affair")

Many conservatives in both the United States and Europe are turning to mythologies of an idyllic Middle Ages, where, in their minds, whiteness and Christianity reigned supreme. The purity that these white supremacists and nationalists are longing for never existed in medieval Iberia. The message that we can glean from a discussion of medieval food culture is one of a co-mingling of cultures. Aside from certain food taboos, most people ate the way their neighbors ate, whether these neighbors came from a Semitic or Christian background. In Iberia, the fifteenth century became the turning point in a politicized agenda of racializing the other.

Food restrictions act as identity markers (Freidenreich, Foreigners 21). In Nazi Germany, the Christian obsession with the pork taboo reared its ugly head. Matthew Sedacca quotes Hermann Fechenbach's memories of 1933 Germany in which he describes how the Nazis would sometimes "smear pork fat on the Holy Ark." Modern hate crimes have made use of a mythologized power of pig fat. There have been multiple reports of using pork products to vandalize mosques and synagogues in the United States and in Europe. Sedacca writes that these attacks "suggest that some in the West now view pork as not just a good insult, but an almost magic talisman that will somehow ward off scary Muslims who fear any contact with the stuff." Seemingly ridiculous, the mythologization of the pork taboo has become part of the structural bias and racial hatred that has blossomed in the post-9/11 world. Nationalists rally around the pork issue as central to the difference between them and the Muslim and Jewish other.

In The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, Darío Fernández Morera concludes his case for restoring Spanish history to what he believes is its rightful place with the following sentiment: "without the Christian resistance and eventual Reconquest, first against the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba and then against the Berber Almoravid and Almohad empires, the Spain of today could well be an extension of the cultures of North Africa and the Middle East" (240). Fernández Morera plays into the fear that we have seen emerging throughout the United States and Europe, that white Christians will no longer be the majority in their "own" lands. Nationalist discourse is brimming with notions of impurity and has taken root in Islamophobia throughout the Western world. Another example is Oriana Fallaci's condemnation of Islam, which harkens back at least to the fifteenth century, faulting Muslims and Jews for halal and kosher slaughter methods, which she portrays as "barbaric" (63).

As scholars of the Middle Ages, we need to keep abreast of the use and abuse of the Middle Ages in order to argue convincingly against the renewal of this racist discourse. Majid writes, "we might as well avoid the tragedies that dogmatic concepts of national identities have engendered, by accepting our true nature as mestizos in a world where national, racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries are dangerous illusions" (173).

The rhetoric of the fifteenth century in Iberia attests to this danger. The many instances of purity and impurity invoked by poets, chroniclers, and politicians to marginalize Jews and Muslims in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain exemplify this. Food and foodways became pretexts for legislation and social stigmatization which were based in part on notions of race. A racializing agenda led to the enactment of laws designed to create a white, Christian Spain through an aggressive and successful effort at ethnic cleansing.